Wandel displays her clear skill as a director of actors in this exercise, but there is the sense that this could have been a painfully visceral short film instead of elongated into a feature where it begins to feel overdone.

It’s an easy watch – even a mostly enjoyable one, thanks to the great time Cage and Pascal are clearly having – but the dialogue stumbles into cheesy territory more often than not, and overall it feels like a missed opportunity to make a bolder statement about the ruthlessness of the Hollywood machine, or indeed Cage’s enduring celebrity.

This is not a politically didactic film, nor a lapel-shaking polemic, but a film whose obligation towards fine dramatic authenticity succeeds in convincing that this is the correct way of thinking, and any alternatives are incorrect.

Don’t call it a throwback though. Despite bearing certain similarities to high-concept action-adventure romantic comedies of yesteryear (namely Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and Six Days, Seven Nights), this is a thoroughly modern romp.

Huezo’s background as a documentary filmmaker is clear in the way this debut narrative feature so solemnly and matter-of-factly observes a community that exists beyond this fictional ‘slice of life’ representation.

The result is incendiary – a lusty romp concerning repressed desire, the seedy underbelly of organised religion and the question of whether it really matters if communion is administered at a church or between a lover’s thighs.

It’s a model of old school screen storytelling, where the robust individual elements coalesce into the exact sum of their parts and not a single ounce out either way.

Anchored by four very strong performances, Murina is a taut psychodrama that makes subtle but impactful statements about misogyny and personal choice.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

Through disrupting linear time, Kapadia’s speculative, poetic rumination on memory, political reality and personal association transforms the viewing experience into something transcendent.

Apollo 10 ½ is about the subjective intimacy of history, and how all events are just an equally-sized, vibrantly-coloured fragment in the kaleidoscope of our mind.

Dolan ensures that such myth comes with a dark gothic edge, unnerving, insidious and uncannily ambiguous, as this clan’s internal problems find their expression in highly incendiary rites of Capgras cleansing.

A chamber piece with a small, charismatic cast, in a location made vivid thanks to strong production design, would seem an ideal model for lower-budget counter-programming efforts, should audiences show up. And with Dick Pope on cinematography duty, the visual realisation tends to avoid staginess.

Harari’s film is a practical, simple and saddening document of everyday madness.

It’s an accomplished directorial debut, focusing on the power of faith and the strength of motherhood to become symbiotic beasts fighting for dominance in its hero’s mind during her quest for autonomy.

It’s a film with fingerprints all over it; one that has been crafted rather than manufactured, and rewatches reveal a chance to revel in its sharpness; a scene in which Amleth seeks the counsel of a blind Seeress (the incomparable Björk) teems with intricate set and costume details, while a violent game of Knattleikr – a Viking cross between lacrosse and rugby – proves more adrenaline-inducing than any CGI special of recent years.

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.

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.

Despite the evasive final scenes which avoid resolving or contextualising Hoss’s fragile mental state, Weisse delivers a captivating psychological exploration of the all-encompassing plights of achieving excellence.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

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.

Carnivalesque both literally and metaphorically, it is a surreal affair, but for all its unnerving strangeness, the depressing subtext is spelt out very clearly.

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.

It’s crazy and colourful enough while it lasts, but the fleeting diversions on offer from Sonic’s first big-screen outing pass too quickly to leave much of a footprint in the memory.

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

This finely-crafted, often affecting film points not necessarily to another sequel, but to a future where the Overlook and its eerie occupants have been frozen in time and locked away, forever and ever and ever…

Short yet elliptical and haunting, and keeping its secrets, this is an assured calling card announcing Godwin’s arrival in the horror family.

Hadaway paints a deep portrait of mental struggles that soon overflow onto the main character’s body, from the peeling bloody skin of her hands to her slashed ribs.