It’s a strange, mythically menacing journey through grief and the self-torments of guilt.

The Sweet East takes an admirably measured look at societal fracture in the modern age, and its use of arch provocation becomes a device to represent a highly recognisable vernacular of despair, where obscenity (both verbal and corporeal) is the only language that cuts through the chaff.

The direction by Davies Jr is top-notch, not just in how he is able to capture the fine nuances of the actors on camera, but also in how they are immersed in the chaotic mêlée of Lagos at this powder-keg moment.

This is a high-energy caper with lots of larger-than-life characters circling to kill, and two innocents at its centre about whose fate and very survival, against all odds, we are made genuinely to care.

Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst weave the darkest satire. In essence their scenario pushes at the same boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable as Anna’s campaign, even as Femke’s vendetta shifts the argument from merely discursive, theoretical terms to the realm of the viscerally physical.

Playing like a Jarmusch – or Amirpour – joint, Sister Midnight is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, never quite finishing its own sentences or following through on narrative expectation.

Campbell’s fearlessness, in both her abrasion and the fragile humanity behind her chaos, helps strike this delicate balance.

Wild at heart, this quiet epic casts a lingering mystical spell, perfect to usher in the forthcoming autumn nights.

A touching sports drama about the here-and-now, rather than victories or defeats.

The result is a luridly coloured, transgressively queered piece of self-conscious schlock where cutting is the business of lovesick killers as much as filmmakers – and both cut right to the heart.

By replacing one, more earthly transcendence, with another, Pleasure confirms itself as a film that lays bare the paradoxes of complying to a flawed system, and critiques the commercialisation of bodies with orgasmic poeticism.

A striking portrait of Shelly’s life that will have you seeking out her work and wondering what could have been.

In this oneiric oddity, consumerism is everything, ultimately devouring even the consumer – while the real horror is the exploitative means of production, carefully kept underground beyond the sight of bourgeois shoppers above.

This is a grimly refreshing and confident toe-dip into the world of horror, and we hope Duane choses to revisit this atmospherically murky pool.

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

No matter what we might think of her, it’s clear that Tammy Faye was one of a kind. Chastain’s mannered plague of tics does right by her in that respect, but she’s been inserted into a template now worn from overuse.

George MacKay is the Record Keeper, in charge of interrogating Faithfull, and she very candidly speaks about her life in her own words in order to decipher the gulf between who she really was and how she was marketed.

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

There’s nothing subtle about these films, from their Eat The Rich messaging to the just-go-with-it in-world lore, but in all of their schlock they strike a welcome tone between winking self-awareness and retro absurdity.

As a director, von Horn is smart enough to recognise that even the most heinous crimes have a human culprit, and as such his sensitive, unsensational film retains a sense of poise and never strays into soap opera territory.

The feeling of nostalgia is perhaps overstressed, and the pacing is odd. But the tension created as foolish Felice drifts into a trap of his own making is magnetic.

Despite a prioritisation of visual effects over story, Memory Box makes a compelling case for chronicling the big and small parts of your life, if only to share with generations to come.

It’s an intriguing set-up which comes to a surprising head, and while some of the twists are a little contrived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admonishment of western nostalgia for its colonial past.

No two trans stories are the same, and it’s validation, empathy and community, rather than Donna’s achievements, that make up the cornerstones of the film.

The smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.

There’s no doubting June Squibb’s charisma, and it’s refreshing to see her in a lead role at the grand age of 94.

This 20th anniversary refit/remaster of 2004’s cult rock- shock-doc Dig! proves that no amount of inadvisable retroactive tinkering can diminish the quality of a core product that’s this good.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with considered dialogue and heartfelt performances that unravels a culturally specific repression, one that got the Iranian filmmakers banned from France and Germany to edit and promote this film, but also the more universal loneliness of the elderly who still have more life to live.