Unnervingly naturalistic performances from two cinematic legends – the great Italian giallo master Dario Argento, the great Italian giallo master and the star of La Maman et La Putain – add to the sense of loss.

The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.

Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

Bones and All deftly segues between teenage romance, hinterland tableaux and genuinely unsettling encounters.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

The enduring quality of the 1953 original is rooted in its engagement with the twin atomic disasters of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This prequel, similarly, yokes American imperialism, postwar malaise, survivor guilt and weaponised atomic power to produce the best action film of the year.

This is a profoundly serious film, one concerned about our disregard for animals and our disintegrating ecosystems, but it is also restlessly alive.

Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

Following on from Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, Crossing gifts us the second essential Georgian screen heroine of 2024.

The film is ultimately a showcase for Sweeney, however. You can see the panic rising beneath the young actor’s calm, collected front. It’s a brilliantly measured turn that couldn’t be further from Sweeney’s iconic breakdown as the vulnerable Cassie on Euphoria.

Maybe, Morgan’s Creek does not have the ironic grit of Sullivan’s Travels or the suave perfection of The Lady Eve, but, as a showcase for Sturges the comic impresario, it can hardly be bettered.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.

Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic.

There’s something of the Greek weird wave or Wes Anderson in Cavalli’s deadpan humour, which is offset by Porcaroli’s wildly energetic central turn.

Sorrentino supplies the occasional surreal house-style flourish – a drifting tear observed in zero gravity – but mostly the director leans into the quiet complexities of Servillo’s turn.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.

Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s debut feature is a formally playful, gorgeously rendered, emotionally impactful adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novella from 2000. Bring tissues.

Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

Lo-fi, disarmingly intense, and shot on textured 16mm by cinematographer Matheus Bastos, this impressive debut feature casts a twitchy, retro shadow over the less salubrious parts of New Jersey.

A film that feels as authentic as it is boisterous.

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

For all the undeniable power of Occupied City, some will wonder if, given its formal repetitions, the piece should not be presented as an installation. Maybe. But the concentration and lack of distraction allow that greater degree of immersion. That sense of being dragged through a narrative – even a non-linear one – is a vital part of its unsettling appeal.

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.