If you scrunch up your eyes and tilt your head you could imagine yourself watching an avant-garde animation at a Brooklyn art house. But there is also, about it, something of the charming work that Oliver Postgate did for British children’s television in the 1970s.

Themes of imperialism and exploitation add background textures to three muscular performances and a mysterious cinematic adventure.

It is the relationship between Grace and Cian that most engages. Galligan, seen recently in the TV series The Great and Kin, exhibits a rare charisma and a gift for dry comedy that should take her far.

Taking cues from the gameplay, this compelling psyche-out is deceptively simple.

From the moment My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade blasts across the opening credits, this is the unexpectedly moving, nostalgia-soundtracked class reunion that you’ll enjoy despite yourself.

What an auspicious debut for Kline and what a fine showcase for all other parties.

Ery Claver, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, provides arresting Steadicam as well as popping colours as cinematographer. In keeping with the film’s novel premise, this is like nothing you’ve seen anywhere else. Aline Frazão’s crashing, jazzy score adds a start to the ghosts in the machine.

Haarla and Borisov demonstrate impeccable timing and expertly tiny movements as they warm up to one another. It’s something like love but without either sex or romance. And it’s a joy to behold.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady cemented their reputation for tender portraits of young people blossoming away from home with their earlier films The Boys of Baraka, Detropia and the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. With Folktales, the veteran documentary duo return to familiar thematic terrain with renewed compassion.

It remains, nonetheless, a pleasure to see a good yarn played out in such professional fashion. Just try not to think of the awful pun in the title.

The three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.

The gunplay of the final act isn’t as much fun as the properly creepy build-up. No matter. This self-aware German-Hollywood coproduction atones with plenty of Teutonsploitation humour.

Directors Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould, and Colleen Hennessy have sifted through hundreds of hours of footage to fashion something that allows for a sense of the person behind the rock casualty. To this end, they do a splendid job.

Now 85, Scott again proves there is nobody so efficient at pressing contemporary technology to the limits. He also draws heroic performances from fleshy human beings

The Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt roasts conventional heroines and female beauty standards in this gruesome, hilarious reworking of Cinderella.

I Never Cry works best as a showcase for a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of a complex character.

Appearing opposite Nora-Jane Noone in a film that twists the actors round each other like competing bindweed, McGuigan could hardly have delivered a more bracing final performance. So savage is her turn that you expect water drops to hiss off her broiling skin.

My Father’s Shadow, which was coproduced by Element Pictures, is not a conventional political drama. Instead it quietly marries personal and national histories, offering a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos, a family and the fragile, frantic ways people try to hold on against tyranny.

There are endless nuances and ironies throughout. Though stories are told, In the Shadow of Beirut is more a mosaic than a narrative tapestry.

Poitras’s biopic of Goldin is powered along by righteous fury: an engaging portrait of both the artist and her activism.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

Not every tweak and shave works — there is a brief, unfortunate vacuum in the closing scene — but Spielberg has given us more than most of us deserve. Here is a fitting, accidental tribute to Stephen Sondheim, whose lyrics still crackle above Leonard Bernstein’s score, a few weeks after his death.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

Hawke and Thames respectively give two big performances to enact a compelling cat-and-mouse game, in a film wherein even the supporting characters are richly drawn.

There is a lot here about how female sexual desire is repressed and sublimated. There is an implied, though not exactly hopeful, treatise on the promise of the later 1960s. Not every risk pays off. But all were worth taking.

Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.