The miracle is that, from tragicomic opening up to a closing blast of Fontaines DC’s In the Modern World, Nino remains an affirmative experience throughout. Highly recommended.

The animation, nodding to anime, web cartoons and DIY punk aesthetics, has a rough-hewn, heartfelt charm. Not every joke lands, but the generous, camp sensibility buoys the material.

It acknowledges loss without overshadowing its protagonist, passionately insisting on personhood and dignity even as the heroine’s awareness drifts away.

Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.

At its best, this classy production reminds us why any film by this director deserves to be treated as a major event.

Stripped of the bells, the whistles and the cheering crowds, what remains is impossible to romanticise: an exhausted, tortured animal, a man performing hypermasculinity to the point of self-annihilation, and inexcusable barbarism.

At just 71 minutes, Erupcja is more sketch than statement. But its potent snapshot of roads not taken stays long after the credits have rolled.

All solid good fun. All professionally honed. A minor miracle.

For all the unfortunate messiness of the film’s later stages, Tuner, shot energetically by Lowell A Meyer, remains engaging throughout thanks to consistently original performances and notably witty dialogue.

Scoot McNairy gives Steve a dog-eared appeal that makes his irresponsibility inseparable from his warmth.

What keeps Power Ballad flowing is the juice of the dialogue, the comic humanity of the plotting and, above anything else, that charmingly ingenuous belief in pop music as something that truly matters. Good work.

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve’s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette’s production design and Parsons’s exquisite direction.

The film’s musical flourishes and takedown of gay and straight cliches are always amusing, if old-school end of the pier.

The friendships feel equally authentic, even when the source material, largely composed of inner monologues, can sound polemic transposed to the big screen. Enda Walsh’s script compensates with beautifully constructed interpersonal relations between swipes at capitalism, landlords and generational decline. Simon Tindall’s fluid camerawork adds to a textured sense of place.

Minotaur works best as gallows humour: a chronicle of a selfish, privileged class trapped in systems they helped create, trying to bury bodies while pretending nothing has happened.

Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty and avalanches of Norwegian precipices, Fjord sustains nail-biting tension across its lengthy running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.

Visually, Paper Tiger recreates grimy late-1980s New York with exquisite period detail. Gray’s long-standing questioning of masculine braggadocio and the fallacy of the American dream remains one of the richest seams in US cinema.

At times the film-within-a-film structure is busy and overcomplicated. Almodóvar gradually pulls the threads together into a sharp and unexpectedly brilliant punchline. If only he had let us in on the joke a little earlier.

Mundane routines acquire a creeping dread, with barns, kitchens and farmyards becoming landscapes of unspoken terror as the heroine clucks her way through a compelling story.

The actors are unlikely to be confused with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur from the Capra flick, but they have a spring-fresh charm that remains pleasing throughout.

The Unknown reworks the body swap, a trope favoured by goofy romcoms, as elevated horror.

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

At the heart of the film is 11-year-old Lidia, raised within this fiercely loving queer household. Through her eyes, Céspedes captures the tenderness and volatility of a family under siege.

Shot in perennial murk, relentless in its cruel focus, Obsession is, at its heart, a deathly serious film with a troubling message to convey. Well worth enduring (if that’s the word).

The Sheep Detectives, a family-friendly whodunit that marries pastoral whimsy with unexpectedly weighty themes, is a rare, woolly beast.

The set list could use a few more upbeat numbers, but the project finds a heartfelt focus in the fans, who sob, snivel and bawl their way through loud, dramatic singalongs. Trembling manicured hands hold thousands of iPhones aloft.

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.