A luminous, heartbreaking performance from Olivia Cooke shines through every frame of Katie Says Goodbye.

While the emotional intensity and somewhat protracted narrative can be exhausting, in visual terms the film is a tour de force, steeped in blood, dust and squalor.

The subtext of In Viaggio (which translates as ‘Travelling’) is that it is while on the road, away from the close confines of the Vatican, that Pope Francis is at his most uninhibited and, therefore, most revealing.

Elegantly shot and fluidly edited, What Is Democracy? reveals Taylor’s sure instincts as she shapes the vast sprawl of often disparate, sometimes random-feeling material into a focused, thought-provoking essay that even leaves you feeling that there was so much more to say on the subject.

Director Ava DuVernay emphasises an emotional clarity and narrative simplicity that allows the book’s sci-fi examination of friendship, family and forgiveness to resonate with almost mythic force.

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.

Big-name stars and dazzling visuals leap off the screen in eye-popping 3D, while the most recognisable chapter of China’s most-beloved literary text plays out in exuberant and energetic fashion. The Year of the Monkey could not have asked for a more enthusiastic welcome.

Terrence Malick often wrestles with the cosmic, the spiritual and the eternal, but with A Hidden Life, the meditative writer-director attacks his usual themes from a rewardingly timely and urgent perspective.

A visually stunning, thoughtful, and profoundly unsettling study of the impact of male violence on the lives of three women played out in the pitiless sunlight of rural southern Mexico, Natalia López Gallardo’s feature debut Robe Of Gems is creepy in all the right ways.

This Hamlet sticks to the narrative essentials to produce a terse, pitiless retelling.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s intriguing, modest drama keeps its focus tight on Gabrielle but, thanks to a keenly observed screenplay and Drucker’s finely balanced performance, presents a wider view on the female mid-life experience.

Sometimes overwhelming but always penetrating, the film practically demands multiple viewings to absorb its rich collection of ideas, images and music.

The result is a polished horror yarn that leads to a satisfying conclusion, and leaves the impression there is more than enough material here for a potential prequel or an extension of Solveig’s story.

Jacoby delivers an adroit portrait of the artist at work in a technical package which wraps itself smoothly around this intense, surprising story.

Last Breath honours the constant possibility in work like this that the worst could happen at any moment — and that the line between living and dying is always frighteningly slender.

Baseball is just a game, but Lund recognises why some need it so badly. On the diamond, these ageing men feel young again – if only for a few hours.

Although there’s certainly a lot going on on screen, our attention is focused on Bening’s central performance.

Infused with nostalgia, United Skates is also an infectious call to arms, noting the way in which communities are starting to fight back.

Arthouse audiences will be intrigued to discover how Sciamma has channelled the fluid energy of her contemporary work into the more constrained environment of a costume drama. It won’t hurt that this is a strikingly handsome production which will be admired on a technical level.

It’s a distinctive work, both visually – the stark black and white photography accentuates the uncanny, almost lunar pockmarks on this scarred terrain – and in terms of its intriguingly detached outback noir storytelling.

Petzold’s lean, crisply-shot tale is a deft shape-changer, switching mood and register, interlacing romance with suspense and sudden jabs of humour.

It fields such a disorientating mix of styles and symbols and tonal swerves (Rupert Everett going full fruit, for example), that it’s quite a surprise that Colbert has managed to weave a structured story throughout She Will. But she has.

Solidly grounded, teeming with thought-provoking ideas, wonderfully atmospheric, and often visually striking, this magical realist eco-fable about a dead mother who returns to transform the lives of her dysfunctional family pays the price for its own high ambition and is simply unable to sustain the intensity until the end. But until then, it’s a hypnotic and entrancing ride.

The end result is a delicate and ultimately touching evocation of first love’s intensity.

All in all, Nine Days is a stellar feature debut, with strong filmmaking, from its assured compositions to its superb dimly lit frames, where shafts of outside light or wall lamps illuminate slivers of the sets. And Winston Duke, who appears in just about every scene in the film, offers a complex portrait of a wounded man.

The message of doom is mitigated by the comraderie of men and women determined to do good, but more so by the wondrous species of coral under threat.

It might be with a child’s eyes that Summer 1993 relates the efforts of a six year-old trying to cope with grief, but it is with maturity, empathy and heartfelt emotion that it conveys the uncertain reality that follows.