Not a lot gets spoken in Run and Jump, the gently eloquent first feature from San Francisco-born filmmaker Steph Green, a dramatic strategy that leaves the actors to charge the unsaid with meaning and the audience - not to mention Ireland, ah Ireland - to do the rest. That the result is as finely honed as it is honours not just the unforced beauty of a country that looks especially gorgeous soaked in rain.

There is a very old joke about a Hollywood actor, waiting to hear whether he has landed a plum role in an upcoming production, who gets a call from his agent. "I’ve got some bad news for you," says the agent. "Your mother has just died." "Oh, thank goodness!" says the actor. "I thought you were going to tell me I didn’t get the part." That says everything there is to know about the cutthroat world of the movie business, something that takes David Cronenberg almost two hours to say in this redundant and pointless evisceration of contemporary Hollywood.

 “Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.

Any synopsis of Two Days, One Night is bound to make it sound like a worthy, sub-Loachian drama: A young mother, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses rather than let her keep her job. But she persuades her boss to host a second round of voting two days later, to allow her the weekend to persuade her fellow workers to support her.

Frankly, the idea of a female superhero flying solo at the front of a modern movie is becoming a bit of a joke. Despite there being a Wonder Woman film in the pipeline, that this relies on the success of "Batman vs. Superman" (both of whom have had their fair share of reboots) is disheartening. But going into an X-Men film there’s always the hope of both sexes having gripping storylines - a trend we’ve also seen play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier - so step forward Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique. In a film that’s all about righting past wrongs you can't do much better than casting an Oscar-winner with a multimillion-dollar franchise under her belt right at the centre of your movie.

If the 60s-set X-Men: First Class was Mystique’s coming-of-age, then its sequel Days of Future Past (which sees Bryan Singer return to the helm) is her reckoning, with the chance for a peaceful future resting in her hands. When Mystique is given the chance to undo a destructive decision, thanks to the power of time travel, she is once again forced to wrangle with her beliefs and allegiances.

We meet Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), who are firm friends in the near future, just as a vast swarm of sentinels approaches their hiding place. They come up with a last ditch attempt to save the world by sending Wolverine's consciousness (Wolverine is played once again by Hugh Jackman, who never seems to age) back to his 70s body, in a Back to the Future / Terminator 2: Judgement Day type mash-up. It's the era of the Nixon administration, with the president playing a key role here and, before you look it up, no Nixon is not played by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band (aka Silvio in The Sopranos) in prosthetics - it's actually Mark Camacho.

Of course Wolverine needs some help so he is tasked with assembling some old friends: a younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is constantly high on junk - well, a serum that allows him to walk but strips him of his telepathic power - and the soon-to-be Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender, pictured above right) who has been imprisoned deep below The Pentagon, accused of assassination.  And so, we are taken on a prison break mission with the addition of young whippersnapper Quicksilver (Evan Peters from American Horror Story) whose super-speed power is introduced in one of the most inspired and fun moments of the film. It's a comic slow-mo scene that plays out to Jim Croce’s "Time in a Bottle" and works just perfectly. 

The fallout from the revolution plays nicely into the 70s setting, with many of the mutants in personal turmoil and suffering from raw wounds. Charles and Erik are at a stale-mate, sparring with one another over the sadness and regret of fallen comrades, which fits in perfectly with the film's Vietnam War backdrop. Fassbender and McAvoy excel at delivering bitter blows and heightened emotions, yet still manage to keep a twinkle in their eye when delivering fan service.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is convoluted and some of it doesn’t make sense but it’s a complete blast from start to finish thanks to a fine cast, good sense of humour and Fassbender spouting James Brown lyrics at random.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past

With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008). Set in a ravaged town in rural Mexico, Escalante's film shows a country enslaved by the drugs trade, its authorities corrupted and its people living in poverty and fear. By combining compositional magnificence and hard-to-watch content Heli gives us beauty intermingled with beastliness.

For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability.

Favourite of the Coens, John Turturro’s fifth turn at the helm is a surprisingly lively, enjoyable fable of male prostitution. After the shuttering of the New York City bookstore where he worked for Murray (Woody Allen), Fioravante (Turturro) is talked into being the male meat in a female sandwich between Selima (Sofia Vergara) and Murray's dermatologist Dr Parker (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, Fioravante doesn't fall for either of his lady-pals. Instead, he finds himself drawn to untouchable Hasidic widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), she herself shuttered since her husband's death.

A blow to the head provides the catalyst needed for Abby (Robin Weigert) to re-think her life in Concussion, writer-director Stacie Passon's acute American indie about a lesbian couple coming adrift and the new life charted by one of the two women, in particular. Would Abby end up welcoming (female) sexual partners for pay to her freshly purchased high-end Manhattan loft had her young son not accidentally sent a baseball winging its way to her head, thereby jolting her reality?

Discussing what appealed to him in Patricia Highsmith’s simmering thriller The Two Faces of January, first-time director Hossein Amini landed on the deliberate lack of character motivation: “She doesn’t really explain why people do things.” This very obfuscation drew attention at the time of the novel’s 1964 publication, when the reader at Highsmith’s publisher identified “a frightening sense of the neurotic” in her approach to drawing characters.