Living begins with a ravishing immersion in vintage footage of a lost world, primary colours popping on a Fifties summer’s day in Piccadilly. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s opulent score adds to the poignancy of an orderly, comfortable England: the country which has slowed the heartbeat and buried the soul of Williams (Bill Nighy), a civil servant called Mr. Zombie behind his back.

How many excellent comedies involving the Nazis are there? To Be or Not To Be, The Great Dictator and perhaps The Producers, but Jojo Rabbit was a mess and My Neighbour Adolf is no better.

The release of Call Jane could not be more timely, just as the American midterms loom and liberals reel from the overturning of legislation that allow women access to safe and legal abortions in the US. This well-crafted drama tells the true story of a group of women in 1960s Chicago who ran a secret organisation that provided almost 12,000 terminations when to do so was a criminal offence. 

The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to the male-dominated art world.

Vesper is a piece of arty European sci-fi, filmed in the forests of Lithuania (homeland of co-director Kristina Buozyte) and set in a dystopian future conjured up by its French co-director Bruno Samper (a "digital experience designer"). The two collaborated in 2012 on Vanishing Waves, which was the first Lithuanian sci-fi film to play in the US, won awards on the festival circuit, and came with quite a lot of explicit erotica.

In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.

Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.

The London Film Festival ended with the announcement of assorted prizes, all well-deserved. My colleague Demetrios Matheou has already written here about the Chilean political thriller, 1976, which won Best First Feature, and we’ll be writing in depth about the  Best Film winner, the Austrian historical drama Corsage, when it opens at the end of the year. 

This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.

Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema.