A New Generation offers no earthshattering conclusions. There is no pretense of covering everything, just a chance to swim in Cousins erudite passion for film and answer his call to keep the faith.

The film’s most considerable achievement, however, is to sustain its drama on a finely poised level of emotional intimacy, while sometimes hitting us with intense imagistic charges, not least the graphic slaughterhouse scenes at the start.

Guzzoni crafts a suitably glowering and hostile atmosphere for this story, which delves into the very murkiest corners of Chilean society.

Newton is fascinating in the role.

Grass demonstrates a fresh type of playfulness from the prolific filmmaker. It’s a movie filled with his usual intimacy, but it’s also one that’s purposefully more concerned with the bigger picture than the individual details.

Very much a collaborative affair between subject Apolonia Sokol and Danish filmmaker Lea Glob, it also functions as a snapshot of millennial creatives and their struggles to balance public and private lives amid external financial and psychological pressures.

Love is a constant saving grace in The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo. Diego Cespedes’s striking debut feature blends together a heady mixture of melodrama, western and coming of age tale to create an imaginative, indignant AIDS-era story.

Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.

Maurery handles her character, a nasty piece of work to be sure, with such natural aplomb that she makes Mrs Drazdechova not only perfectly credible but pretty scary too.

Babyteeth is a funny, affecting group portrait, a comedy-tinged family drama.

Conjuring up a serving of visual magic is one thing, of course; bringing Kipling’s characters and narrative to life is another.

It’s fair to say that in this singular piece of filmmaking, with its dense deep-dive into arcane legend and mythology, selling out is certainly not on the cards for Masaaki Yuasa right now.

This gritty social realist character study is spiked with striking and unexpected detours.

In its unassuming way, the film is a celebration of creativity and of emotional connections forged through art. But Nagi Notes is unassertive in its themes and, at times, gentle almost to a fault.

A melancholy character piece about a man who senses his run is nearly over, Jockey rides Clifton Collins Jr.’s gentle central performance to modest glory.

Thompson reveals his deep love for this musician by looking past the rock-doc cliches, searching for the soul of a man who put every ounce of it into his songs.

[A] very entertaining, surprisingly moving film.

Prophet’s Prey is more effective at presenting the enigmatic figure of the Prophet himself. His drawling somnolent voice hovers over the movie like a menacing ghost.

Not only is it an affectionate and personal film – the subject, Elsa Dorfman, is a long-standing friend and Morris’s emotional investment in her story is evident in every frame. It’s also far more informal in approach than his normal forthright technique.

Street-shot, cluttered and claustrophobic, Left-Handed Girl is both fast and slow, moving along at a relentless pace yet taking time to advance a storyline that turns out to be about the precariousness of women’s independence and the perpetuation of male privilege – sometimes by the very women that suffer under it.

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.

Understated and confidently judged, it becomes a testimony to the old-fashioned virtues of social-realist storytelling rooted in ordinary lives and timely concerns.

A harsh history lesson as well as a good yarn, this visually arresting endeavour registers strongly at a time when refugees account for a record 1% of the world’s population.

A rough-hewn fairytale unfolding against a fully realised world, this is an arresting feature debut for director Laura Samani.

An invigoratingly savage Nordic western, The Promised Land is earthy, enjoyable stuff: an expansive, sweeping epic with hope in its heart and dirt under its nails.

A moving lead performance from Adele Exarchopoulos is the film’s strongest selling point.

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).

There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.