The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda  chose to make Broker in South Korea, with Parasite star, Song Kang-ho. He plays one of two dodgy chaps who make a living selling abandoned babies to desperate couples.

We’ve now reached film 31 and Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly baroque franchise. Four years after Avengers: Endgame’s false finale, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is still basking in his role in reversing Thanos’s genocidal Blip, and reacting to the MCU’s version of the pandemic by semi-retiring from Avenging for some Me time.

“He’s my best friend, a brother,” says Felice Lasco (Pierfrancesco Favino) of his childhood buddy, Oreste Spasiano (Tomasso Ragno). After 40 years away, Felice, a successful, married businessman, has returned to Naples from Cairo to see his aged mother (Aurora Quattrocchi).

He hasn’t seen Oreste since he left at the age of 15. No letters, no phone calls. Nostalgia can be dangerous. A clue: Oreste is now known as Badman. Shades of Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.

The Son is one of those movies where everyone is acting their socks off, exhibiting their range and sensitivity to the point where one can imagine there was a bucket on the set positioned to drop in the expected awards. It may well work for Florian Zeller’s theatre fans used to a lot of intense anguished dialogue, but it’s very claustrophobic as a film and lacks the tricksy double casting of key characters that made The Father intriguing.

Magic Mike began as a cautionary tale rooted in Channing Tatum’s spell as a teenage stripper, then morphed into a franchise of reality and theatre shows. Now this second sequel brings original director Steven Soderbergh back, and leaps into pure fantasy.

Women Talking is very powerful. It was adapted by writer-director Sarah Polley from the novel that Miriam Toews, raised a Mennonite in Canada, based on terrible events that took place in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009.

“They say there are only two stories,” explains director Treasa O’Brien. “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” O’Brien was born in Dublin to a naval family that had to up sticks and move every two or three years. Her first school was in Malta, where the other kids would neither speak to her nor play with her since she was an outsider.

Saint Omer is a psychological and sociological mystery, unpicking the enigma of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a French Senegalese woman who drowned her 15-month-old daughter in the ocean.

The Shrek universe expands a little more with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, another computer-animated family film from DreamWorks, with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinnault reprising their roles as Puss and his frenemy Kitty Softclaws. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado serve up a treat, one worthy of its Oscar nod for best animated feature.