In space no one can hear you scream, but they usually can in a cinema. Wednesday night’s gala launch of Alien: Romulus was awash with the gussied-up cast and writer-director Fede Álvarez, alongside assorted Olympians and influencers walking the red carpet.

Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Nash’at is either very brave or slightly unhinged. His debut full-length documentary is an account of a year he spent in Afghanistan with the Taliban, after they’d taken control of the country at the end of August 2021, following the catastrophically inept evacuation of US and NATO forces.

Don’t think too hard about the narrative absurdity of Trap, the new movie wriitten and directed by M Night Shyamalan. There’s a serial killer called The Butcher on the loose in Philadelphia and though the FBI doesn’t know their quarry’s name or what he looks like, they muster what looks like hundreds of agents, SWAT teams, and private security to bring him in.

This heist-orientated black comedy could appeal to fans of the likes of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven or the same director’s Out of Sight, without ever quite matching their zip and sparkle. But there are enough loud bangs and big bucks to provide an entertaining night in (presupposing there are suitable lubricants to hand), though you wouldn’t think so from some of the ferociously negative reviews it’s been receiving.

So, it falls to me to review perhaps the least-anticipated film of the year. Borderlands is based on an admired video game, and there may be nothing more hostile than pissed-off video-gamers.

The tsunami of online negativity aimed for weeks at merely the film’s trailer was nothing compared to the onslaught that followed the lifting of review embargoes these past few days. The picture was slammed and dunked. If they think it’s all over for the era of Peak Superhero Movie, it is now. Come back Madame Web, all is forgiven.

“I think my dad might have been an alien,” Adam (Faraz Ayub; Line of Duty; Screw) tells a self-help group he wanders into. What does that make him? He doesn’t feel at home anywhere – not with his family or, perhaps not surprisingly, at his job in a burger bar at Sky Peals motorway services.

There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” urged King Lear, accompanied by the Fool, on the blasted heath. But that’s not quite snappy enough for the storm-chasers of Twisters as they drive their souped-up four-by-fours across the tornado-blitzed flatlands of Oklahoma. Their motto is “if you feel it, chase it!” which is pretty much all they do for the movie’s two-hour duration.

El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is a test of stamina: a 3hr 15min study of a man paralysed by negative thinking. It also contains striking freeze-framed portraits of people and places that you want to pause and look at even longer than the editing allows, so beautiful are they.