When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.

Alas, the film does slip towards industry-standard punch-ups in the last 15 minutes. But there is enough promise in this cheeky, witty, incisive shocker to let us look forward to inevitable sequels with something like enthusiasm.

Few will complain about the delicious perplexities of the opening hour. The film’s focus on the sadness of remote lives – everyone here seems alone – adds satisfactory emotional ballast.

Along the way, Scala!!! (the number of exclamation points varies) takes in the history of a wider culture. You could see the community under discussion as that swimming in the long wake of punk.

This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

It mostly succeeds on old-fashioned smack-’em-up and sure personal chemistry.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance.

The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self.

There are no big dramas, save for a call up to the office for skipping a school trip. Reiko Yoshida’s script instead foregrounds sincere friendship and the joyful mechanics of songwriting.

Servants confirms the director as a major talent.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

Adam Arkapaw’s dynamic cinematography, the pulsing electronica of the director’s regular composer (and brother) Jed Kurzel, and a snarling script make for a taut and gritty thriller that could pass for a moody, rediscovered early-1970s classic originally shot sometime between The French Connection and Death Wish.

At 118 minutes, Tina – an old-fashioned marriage of talking heads and footage– is long for a music documentary. But there’s plenty to mull over, a fine array of contributors and wonderful archive material.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Civil War is wan as satire. But it’s an action stormer for the ages.

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

There are cruising parallels with American contemporaries the Ross Brothers and Halina Reijn, but this daisy chain has an earnest, festive charm unlike any other. It’s a vibe.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

This is the kind of issue-driven cinema that used to win Oscars. That Dark Waters and Just Mercy weren’t mentioned during awards season is as troubling as it is perplexing.

Moving from his standard New York neurotic, Eisenberg does a convincing job of moving from frustration to a violent, active mania. Poots is better still as someone who can’t find the words to communicate her growing despair.

Morris plays along, but his visuals – shadowy rooms, obfuscated photographs, carefully filleted scenes from adaptations of the novelist’s work – hint that this isn’t the whole story.

None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.

Passing is, in some ways, a slender story. But Hall’s feel for the period and her gift for folding potent discourse into the attractive visuals kicks it up to the level of high art.