We tend to indulge hagiography when it comes to biopics of pop icons. To get the rights to their music, producers often have to let the icons themselves pull the strings. It’s a pact much like the compromises we make all our lives with the music industry – becoming fans of a world riddled with rip-offs, scams and scandals. We’ll only pay to see the film if we’re given the music, as we’re only half-interested in the life.

In Mark Jenkin’s Cornish cinema, lost boats, drowned men and ways of life wash back in with the tide, nothing truly gone. Where his feature debut Bait (2019) tackled the violence stirred by second-home gentrification in a humiliated fisherman and Enys Men (2022) found elliptical folk-horror in tin mine echoes, Rose of Nevada falls through time in a fishing village which is barely hanging on.

Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”. But not enough for the curators of Multitudes, a multi-disciplinary festival at the Southbank Centre this month, who paired the it with a specially-commissioned animated film by 1927 Studios. Bad idea.

“Since when was getting older an honour?” asks Tereza, rightly suspicious when she finds officials nailing up a cheap garland around her front door and presenting her with a medal. This is Brazil, sometime in the near future, and the government has decided that anyone over 75 is an economic burden on younger workers. No matter how fit you still are, you must hand in your work clothes and accept being shipped off to ‘the colony’ on a caged truck dubbed the wrinkle wagon. 

This entertaining, gorgeous-looking film within a film, directed and written by multi-talented Turkish-Italian Ferzan Özpetek (he’s also directed operas and written several novels), starts in the present day with a large, noisy lunch party.

Nine-year-old-year-old Callie-Rose (the extraordinarily talented Australian actor Lily LaTorre; Run Rabbit Run) needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework. The trouble is, there's no signal because her dad, a reticent cowboy named Dusty (an excellent Josh O’Connor), is living in a trailer on a FEMA campsite, his farm having burned down in wildfires.

When Jim Jarmusch won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, it came as something of a surprise. The best film award had been widely expected to go to the emotionally demanding The Voice of Hind Rajab, not to the mannered ensemble piece that is Father Mother Sister Brother. Perhaps the jury, led by Alexander Payne, a fellow American auteur, felt that it was time to honour another veteran indie film-maker, or that it was just too politically fraught to award a docudrama set in Gaza.

“He’s got a brother who’s a brotha!” exclaims an ecstatic Anna (Halle Bailey; The Little Mermaid; The Colour Purple) to her bestie (Aziza Scott) back in New York. She’s just arrived in Tuscany, where she’s trying to pass herself off as the fiancée of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who she’s only met once, briefly.

Matteo has a British-accented cousin, Michael (not his brother, and maybe he’s adopted, but never mind) who’s played by Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton). Cue shirts off in a vineyard, swoon, screams of excitement from the audience.

Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.

James McAvoy’s directing debut has a plot that’s so implausible, it would probably be laughed out of pitch meetings. But the story is essentially true, as recounted in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “Based on a true lie”, the opening credits announce.