Rather like the ill-fated plane, the comedy struggles to land.

O’Shea finds hope in how much Ireland has changed in recent years. Yet her film powerfully documents what happened within living memory, the trauma still experienced by those who survived it and the inspiration from an often invisible resistance who helped to bring about change.

Using simple means, Kang and his team take banal situations and settings — much of the action unfolds in a city-centre apartment building — and render them just eerie enough to be unsettling.

Project Silence presents us with a kaleidoscope of different characters all caught up in the same terrible nightmare, but very few of them have lively personalities – and the same holds true for the film itself. The dogs may be merciless, but Kim Tae-gon never goes for the throat.

Ramona is both wonderful and appalling, and Vazquez’s edgy performance drags us entirely into her relentless, thoughtless world, with her flaming red hair, her smoker’s cough, her gravelly tones and her unfailing ability to bring joy and despair to those around her.

While the film’s conclusion is perhaps a little heavy-handed, the delivery of the message – of women’s reproductive rights and agency over their lives and bodies – is an emphatic slam dunk.

It’s an offbeat combination of erudite esoterica and sensory pleasures (many of them music-related) that patient viewers may find beguiling.

Streetwise is too familiar in terms of plot beats to completely stand out from the crowd but its unerring sense of place will nonetheless make Na a director to watch.

How does where we are from impact on the kind of love we feel? López Riera’s answer, which can be summed up as boy meets girls meets magical realism meets women’s solidarity, is both intimate and ambitious in scope, thought-provoking and emotionally engaging.

An episodic string of very uneven vignettes, the film benefits hugely from the unifying presence of artist Pousti — a non-pro, like the rest of the uneven cast — who dominates nearly every scene with a genial, subdued intensity as the thirtysomething, bear-like Mr Amir.

The result is an engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected; the various sections of the film are divided by ruminative fades to black.

Writer-director Andrea Di Stefano crafts a tense yet also rather moving thriller-melodrama out of the most cliched premise: a cop who is talked into running a favour for a gangland boss on his last night before retiring. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a stylish Italian crime thriller.

While the dramatic destination may be signposted fom the off, this well-observed debut from actor-turned-director Prasanna Puwanarajah handles its themes lightly, leaning into dark comedy rather than melodrama, and that approach, together with strong central performances, serves it well.

Initially intriguing, Ashkal grows less satisfying as it struggles to do justice to the disparate elements of the personal, the political and the supernatural.

There’s a disconnect between her inventive, impressionistic artistic output – Audrey’s actual work is interspersed throughout the picture – and the film’s flat, rather matter-of-fact look.

Wagner takes a reserved approach to potentially heart-tugging developments. There is an air of confidence and composure in the film.

2018 wears its heart on its sleeve and succeeds as tense, well-paced popular entertainment.

Jacquet makes the fundamental miscalculation — at least for non-French audiences — of assuming that his endless musings about why he is drawn to this part of the world, delivered at length in his own voice, are, well, sufficiently interesting.

Mbakam has brought the patience of a documentarian to a character study that lets the details create an accumulative affect.

Rooted in a great injustice, Lubo ­– the film – becomes a curious, sometimes intriguing but ultimately frustrating portrait of a man undone by that injustice.

At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.

It’s a robustly entertaining romp.

A striking first feature steeped in allegory, dust and despair, The Penultimate brings a blend of absurdity and theatricality to a stylised tale of humanity unravelling.

The documentary is a work of earnest advocacy, pleading with viewers to see their stake in Taiwan’s fight. The results may not be gripping cinema, but the passion behind the project is undeniable.

Anchored by a lived-in performance from Wanlop Rungkumjad as a bedraggled migrant caregiver striving to maintain his humanity despite being exploited by his employer, this is a deeply sobering expansion of Chiang’s thematic focus.

Nastase is a compelling, complex character.

A suffocating slipknot drama, it embeds violence and extortion in a destructive ecosystem, showing that every favour is loaded, every gift poisoned, every debt unpayable. Brutality never cleanses in Kim’s impressive debut; it simply engenders more brutality.

Cottontail does not hold any great surprises and, while understanted and full of grace, also lacks bite.