On Thursday we went to Reading Film Theatre to see God's Own Country. If, in Cartman's immortal words, American independent cinema is all about gay cowboys, then is British independent cinema about gay sheep farmers? I enjoyed the film, but I did find it full of contrivances and contradictions. Johnny is plainly a bit of an idiot, who can barely be trusted with anything in the eyes of his parents, but as his father is incapacitated he has all the responsibility for the work on the farm. Despite this, and living in the middle of nowhere, there's no shortage of opportunities for casual sex and he also has enough money to get blind drunk most evenings. His mates have all left for university, although some of them have returned for "reading week". Gheorghe, the "only person who applied for the job" as a farm hand during the lambing season, is a Romanian migrant worker who speaks excellent English, is hard working, knowledgeable about his trade, and even makes sheeps' milk cheese. No wonder, in this vision of the world, they are "stealing our jobs". I do feel, in general, we are living the consequences of Blair's well-intentioned but flawed "education, education, education" mantra. As a member of the liberal metropolitan elite, I don't claim any expert knowledge of farming. But I have been rambling in the Lake District during the lambing season, and I have quite literally seen ewes giving birth. They don't, in general, need any human help. The idea that Johnny and Gheorghe are sent to a ruined shack up at the top of the hill for a few nights to keep an eye on the sheep is a fairly obvious plot device - dating, I would say, from at least the time of Virgil - but it seems a bit detached from reality. Another thing that I didn't find convincing was the scene in which Gheorghe skins a still-born lamb to use its fleece to provide an extra layer of warmth for a weak but live lamb - it seems unlikely to me that you could reasonably do this in plain view of the sheep, nor that the scent of the dead lamb wouldn't affect either the lamb or its mother - though on the other hand it also reveals a significant difference in the value placed on the weaker livestock by Johnny and Gheorghe. Maybe they do things differently in the Yorkshire Dales; the whole story is laced with grittiness and a suggestion that the farm hasn't been well run for a long time.

Last night I went to see Hotel Salvation at Reading Film Theatre. Daya, the old man of the family, announces he believes it is his time to die and wants to do so in Varanasi; his middle-aged son Rajiv feels obliged to accompany him on this quasi-pilgrimage, although it means setting aside his high-pressured middle-class job for a set of religious reasons he seems quite ambivalent about. To me, all the cultural aspects of the film were foreign and exotic, so it's quite possible I missed things, but it seemed that the main focus was on familial relationships - and especially conflicts - across the generations, friendships in old age, and the dissonance of development in modern India. Obviously, from the theme it's clear there aren't going to be many comical moments, though Navnindra Behl gives a spirited performance as the uplifting character Vimla, the elders taking marijuana-laced milk drinks are like something from Ab Fab, and the scene with Rajiv's low-bandwidth video call back home from the Internet cafe is farcical (though hardly uncommon, even in the West, a few years ago). Rajiv's office location looks quite similar to that depicted in The Lunchbox, a computer screen on the desk with files and files of paperwork on the shelves behind, which makes me think it's quite generic. Varanasi is made to look picturesque and romantic in some respects, but it's definitely shabby and third-world, and Rajiv is quite uncomfortable there. A thoughtful film.

The moon landings hadn't finished before I was born, but I am way too young to remember them. As a youngster and through my teenage years, though, there was news from time to time about the Voyager probes, and I am nostalgic for the BBC's Horizon documentaries that followed each planetary encounter. Marking the 40th anniversary of their launch is the documentary film The Farthest. It didn't appear in the listings for this term's Reading Film Theatre, so I looked for other options. Working in central London gives you the widest opportunity and I found it was showing at Picturehouse Central, by Piccadilly Circus. Billed as a "no ads" showing, I was getting a bit restless after about 20 minutes of adverts, concerned that maybe I was in fact in the wrong screen, but it turned out all right in the end.

There are some negative points to the film. The music, like some of Murray Gold's work for Doctor Who, was intrusive at times. For whatever reason, the director couldn't resist the unscientific whooshing sound in animations as the spacecraft passes by the point of view of an observer in the vacuum. There seems to be quite an emphasis on the "human-interest" aspect of the Voyager programme, which is I suppose reasonable, but dwells in particular in the early stages of the film on the Golden Record. (It's not without interest; in particular, it's good to see Nick Sagan, one of the child voices on the record, reminiscing about his father).

There is also some politics. The mission was approved by Nixon, initially to cover Jupiter and Saturn only. This was a 1-in-176 year opportunity to visit all four major planets in the outer solar system ("The last person who had the opportunity to make this decision, Mr President, was Thomas Jefferson. He blew it.") Curiously the film doesn't delve into the process whereby funding for the project was extended to Uranus and Neptune, though it does cover the scientific aspects of that decision. (Voyager 1 was given a path for a close fly-by of Titan, which precluded it venturing to the other two planets; had the results of the Titan observation justified Voyager 2 taking the same path, the mission would have ended there).

What's left, then, is the story of the science and the scientists. The many interviews that are spliced together over the course of the film are mostly - though not exclusively - now of old men, itself a sobering thought. The "technology freeze" for the mission was in 1972. The computing power of Voyager is minuscule by today's standards but was leading-edge at the time - the first spacecraft that could be re-programmed en voyage. The revelations of the Jupiter observations in 1979, including its satellites and ring, were followed by the majesty of Saturn in 1981. Problems with the motors on Voyager 2's instrument arms had to be resolved after Saturn. The flyby of Uranus in 1986 unfortunately coincided with the Challenger disaster. Although a success scientifically, the tilted planet was surprisingly bland and un-photogenic. In 1989, Neptune was more spectacular.

In 1990, Voyager 1 took the famous Pale Blue Dot picture, a frippery in scientific terms, inspired, as were many things in the programme, by Carl Sagan. It is the most distant human-produced artefact and is reckoned to have left the solar system in 2012. Both Voyager probes are still in contact with the NASA mission, with light signals taking more than 19 hours between Voyager 1 and Earth. As Lawrence Krauss observes in the film, it's almost certain that the Voyager probes will survive longer than humanity, and also almost certain that no other civilisation will ever encounter them. But there's the Golden Record, just in case.