The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel has captured a particular moment in time. A few long-term residents of the legendary building at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan are still hanging in there after several years of constant and oppressive building noise.

We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows.

Timing is everything. The release of Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider at a time when the world’s attention is turned to the treatment of women in Iran should win it more ticket sales than his previous (and far better) film Border managed in 2019.

Perhaps Michael Haneke led the way with The Piano Teacher. But it’s still surprising to find a film set in the rarefied world of classical music that can be taut and mysterious, while dealing with such urgent contemporary issues as workplace abuse and cancel culture, and introducing one of the most complex, compelling film characters in years.

Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline.

Sam Mendes assembled most of the ingredients necessary to make Empire of Light a wrenching English melodrama with a potent social theme. The stars are Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Micheal Ward and Toby Jones. Mendes teamed with his usual cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose elegant panoramic images lend a grandeur to Margate’s faded glory. The town’s art deco Dreamland Cinema provided the main location of a movie admirably modest in scale. 

There are going to be people who enjoy A Man Called Otto I’m sure, but it’s definitely not a film for hardened cynics or Tom Hanks' finest hour. It’s a remake of 2017’s Swedish black comedy, A Man called Ove – itself based on a popular novel. The original movie cast Rolf Lassgård (better known as detective Wallander) as a depressed, misanthropic widower whose various attempts to kill himself fail with comic effect.  

“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her?

Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.

The bond between humans and animals sometimes passeth all understanding. Wildcat is the story of 20-something British Army veteran Harry Turner, American ecologist Samantha Zwicker, and a young ocelot called Keanu, who becomes an almost mythic talisman of Harry’s battle with post-traumatic stress and suicidal urges.