As the jokes start to sour and the night shifts to something more serious, Wilde and her dramatically experienced ensemble are able to handle a difficult tonal descent without slipping.

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed.

This unsettling parable has a scriptural concision and mystery.

The way Friedland subtly works in these little touches is truly impressive. But her finest achievement here may be casting Chalfant, who gives an astonishingly nuanced, considered and graceful performance.

Ladykins, Stop! That! Train! is a winner. Perhaps that’s unsurprising seeing as many recent Drag Race challenges have felt like mini movie sets themselves, with elaborate scripts and costumes. And while recent gay movies like Pillion and Blue Film have focused on uncomfortable home truths about queer life, Stop! That! Train! offers refreshingly rosy escapism. See it with as rowdy – and gay – an audience as possible.

Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home.

This nifty little movie keeps you guessing and when it eventually shows its hand, there’s still plenty of mileage left in the characters.

Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

Leo Woodall’s breakout TV roles in The White Lotus and One Day offered a megawatt charisma, but for his biggest film role to date he dims it to a soft glow with gentle performance opposite Dustin Hoffman as one of a pair of New York piano tuners. And what a pair they are; they are a real pleasure to watch in an easy, unforced drama that mixes romcom moments with a relaxed crime thriller.

Far from reiterating tired binaries – tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters – the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms. Even when the possibility of reconciliation appears out of reach, it is the effort to communicate – whether through words or art – that brings peace.

An absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork.

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture.

The Esiris have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.

Her Private Hell resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

It’s a meaty drama with big scenes and big but carefully considered performances: a really substantial piece of work from Gray.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

Ritchie is more deeply invested in the thought-through craft of making a B-movie than many of his peers and there’s a smooth sensuousness to how he moves, each of them looking, feeling and sounding like films he genuinely cares about.

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.