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.

David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. 

François Ozon’s film of Albert Camus's The Stranger, one o

It’s hard to describe this hot mess of a film without divulging the entire plot. And even if you did, you’d struggle to convey the scabrous psychosexual atmosphere, or summarise the thematic currents that swirl beneath the surface. As director Peter Medak says in one of the interviews on this typically well-stocked BFI disc, “It's too complicated to explain."

Immaturity is a virtue in Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy, a slapstick class satire set in an exclusive New York apartment block where being on the list gains a hellish new meaning. Derivative, fright-free and frenetically stylised, it still partially confirms the promise of the director’s 2018 debut Why Don’t You Just Die!

The vertigo of lawlessness in Stalin’s Russia carries contemporary resonance in Sergei Loznitsa’s latest Soviet parable. As a Russian dictator invades a neighbour and erases his enemies and the US Supreme Court presides over an authoritarian rampage, paranoid purges and show trials no longer seem distant.

“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018).