Traumatic obsession is hard to get right in film, to draw us as viewers into a situation far beyond our usual experience, make us believe in it, and fix us there. Sometimes it means pushing towards the frenetic energy of madness, which can bring a degree of moment-to-moment tension – no small dramatic advantage. Or there’s the opposite: when we’re invited deep into the withdrawal of catatonic grief, which can come with almost stuporous slowness and silences.

The extraordinary workings of an unusual mind are reduced to TV-movie proportions in The Man Who Knew Infinity, the latest and least re-telling of the too-short life of the self-taught Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose tale has previously been told in novel form (David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk) and as an Olivier Award-winning play (A Disappearing Number). 

Migration is the lead story of modern geopolitics. So it’s surprising – even baffling – that so few films tell the migrant’s tale. British and French films across the broadest spectrum have dramatised the quest of colonial incomers to assimilate – from Bend It Like Beckham all the way across to La Haine – but Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan goes right back to the source.

Fans of writer-director Jeff Nichols might detect echoes of his hair-raising 2011 film Take Shelter in his latest effort, not least the presence of regular Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon as one of the leads, but this time his scope has broadened hugely. Cosmically even, since Midnight Special hints at hidden universes and galaxies far, far away, even though it's firmly rooted in the everyday detail of the rural American South.

By finishing last in the ski jumping events at the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, Eddie Edwards became the epitome of the plucky no-hoper, a mediocre amateur equipped only with British true grit. He epitomised a curious strain in the national psyche, whereby our nation has been able to celebrate the calamity of Dunkirk as a heroic escapade, and endure with masochistic stoicism decades of humiliation in tennis or World Cup football.

The tag-line for this definitively audacious Berlin thriller-love story writes itself: “One take. One night. Who survives?” Director Sebastian Schipper filmed Victoria in one take that roams through dozens of locations in Berlin’s empty small-hours streets, with dialogue improvised by his core young cast of five. Hitchcock tried something similar, editing Rope’s 10-minute takes to simulate continuous action much as Birdman did, while Orson Welles’ long, bravura opening shot in Touch of Evil was emulated at Boogie Nights’ start.

Even by the varied experiences of transferring Shakespeare to another culture, with the attendant revelations that come when an original story is modified to match a world governed by very different priorities, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is virtually in a class of its own. So it’s a curious thought that associations with King Lear were not in fact at the forefront of the great Japanese director’s mind when he started working in the mid-1970s on what would become his last full-scale epic.

The Chilean director Pablo Larrain completed his loose trilogy about his country confronting the legacy of its Pinochet years four years ago with No. Striking a distinctly upbeat note after the two films that had preceded it, Tony Romero and Post Mortem, its title came from the unexpected referendum result that deprived the dictator of an anticipated extension of his mandate, and was seen through the story of the advertising men behind that epoch-changing vote.

These are sensitive times when it comes to playing anyone on screen with a mental health condition, particularly when it’s a comedy with Kristen Wiig. But Welcome to Me pulls it off, skittering nimbly along a tightrope between offensiveness, surreal humour and mawkishness.

Amazing, isn't it, how the good ol' comic book is inexorably swallowing the planet. With the Marvel empire running rampant through all media, DC Comics are racing to catch up with their DC Extended Universe. It debuted with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel in 2013, and continues here as Snyder returns to helm this bloated yarn of superheroes at loggerheads.