In lesser hands, this could have been merely a gimmick but, with his feature debut, director Ben Leonberg delivers an effective, genuinely unsettling chiller.

While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.

Garver’s film is above all a celebration of the pleasure of intellectual and emotional response to art (“To be paid for thinking is a marvellous way to live,” Kael says), and a picture of a style of thinking that might be seen as distinctively but non-stereotypically female.

The boisterousness remains, as does the unreconstructed maleness that has often been a jarring mannerism in his work. But new intimacy also yields a lightness and tenderness that are a welcome addition to Sorrentino’s palette.

It’s a testament to Macdonald’s performance (and later, to Khan’s charm) that we share her passion for puzzling.

Muylaert handles an atmosphere charged with intensely conflicting expectations with a light touch, and sparks of humour.

Ireland and Hill have crafted a layered Shakespearean adaptation that is intricate and immersive — a description that applies to the performances, including Winter in a role which was originally earmarked for Hill.

Costa’s use of news footage, tapes of incriminating conversations that were made public and acts of self-serving betrayal gives The Edge Of Democracy the feel of an All The President’s Men-style political thriller. Further revelations about her own family and the allegiances of earlier generations turn that aspect of the story into something with the sweep of The Godfather.

The do’s, don’t’s and don’t-even-go-there’s of contemporary dating have long been standard fodder for US indie cinema, but they rarely get dissected quite so tartly, or with such weirdly impassive wit, as in The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed.

It’s a small miracle that such a stylistic pick and mix should cohere into something satisfying, but it does.

Matthew Heineman does break the mold in Cartel Land and gets inside citizens movements – better known as vigilantes – which overturn the cartels’ monopoly on violence, for a while.

The film plays with and deconstructs the familiar repertoire of Diana myths and images, to offer an empathetic, intelligent insight into the prison of fame and privilege, with Kristen Stewart offering a lead performance that is brittle, tender, sometimes playful and not a little uncanny.

A fair bit of historical scene-setting at the beginning means that the picture takes a while to hit its stride. But once it does, there is much to enjoy in this big, brawling ruck of an action movie.

This is a ‘minor’ Hong compared to some of the sixteen films he has premiered since 2010 . . . But it’s still a delight, a wistful, smart, chamber piece that gently teases out questions about whether you can love someone without controlling them in some way, whether acting can be sincere or sincerity can be an act, and how much of our life in the present and future is conditioned by our life in the past (a lot, as it turns out – but we knew that already).

Eagles Of The Republic reunites Saleh with Fares Fares, the lead in the earlier pictures, to mock film industry egos while delivering a chilling commentary about a tyrannical government which imposes its will both through media propaganda and deadly force.

What lends this film distinction is the way it evolves into a story of female empowerment, and the bond between mother and daughter as they combat the pernicious evils of a patriarchal society.

The spirit king of the Greek Weird Wave has produced a profoundly puzzling, dizzyingly disturbing and dark-hearted set of loosely-connected stories which manage to be discordantly amusing and strangely exhilarating – a cinematic salt-rub.

There’s a cheerful pragmatism to the characters and the piece itself, a reflection and distillation of the caring, musical, religious community in which it is set. Deliberate and unhurried, Islands is also the type of quiet film that happily watches a microwave as it warms chicken adobo for a full minute.

On the whole, The Father incorporates what could have just been a storytelling gimmick and infuses it with such sorrow, grace and even the occasional dark joke that it becomes a profound exploration of how we say goodbye to someone dear to us — even though they have not yet really gone.

Even when the filmmaking falters, Krisha Fairchild’s unsettlingly intense lead performance dominates the movie, leaving us feeling as captive as the character’s wary kin.

Tender without sentimentality, the doc by Ron Mann is as absorbing as it is understated.

Arcevedo is certainly as preoccupied with image as he is content and it is perhaps the individual frames and tableaux which linger on past this resolutely-downbeat, emblematic story.

A solidly entertaining remake peppered with a few transcendent moments, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story emphasises the musical’s most beloved elements without trying to radically reinterpret the source material.

It is easy to see where Wet Season is heading but Chen invests so much in the needs and flaws of the central duo that you want to see how it plays out.

Debut feature director Sebastien Vanicek proves to be adept at wringing every drop of tension out of this slim narrative, elevating this B-movie creature feature to A-grade horror.

It’s seductive, fragmented, involving.

For all its visual prowess, the film’s most successful element is its balance of the fantastical with the familiar.

Though its many narrative twists and amusing turns might wear down less adventurous viewers, this film will be embraced by those who enjoyed the director’s dystopian critique Sorry to Bother You and his equally scathing series I’m a Virgo.