How do you make a film about death, love and loss that avoids being sentimental, maudlin or pretentious? Take your cue from Portuguese artist Catarina Vasconcelos.

The relative runt of the Godfather litter was hacked out in a Las Vegas casino, as Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo worked up scenarios for an assignment taken on for the money.

A story of forbidden love, Great Freedom takes place almost entirely in a prison. The film's background is encapsulated in the word “175er/ hundertfünfundsiebziger”, still to be found in German dictionaries and collective memories as a pejorative word for a gay man.

One feels, or perhaps hopes, that if she could have avoided it, first-time feature director Ruth Paxton might not have started A Banquet as she ultimately did: with Holly Hughes (Sienna Guillory) arduously scrubbing the frame of her husband’s hospital-style bed, as he coughs, gasps, and weeps for an end to whatever ghastly affliction he has been dealt. 

There’s a long tradition of foodie romances proving art-house cinema hits – think of Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, and Chocolat. Sadly, it’s unlikely that Master Cheng, a gentle and very slow Finnish-Chinese coproduction about a chef from Shanghai charming the Nordic locals with his cleaver skills, is going to light up the UK box office. 

Robert Pattinson’s Batman is lean and aquiline, his Bruce Wayne an obsessive recluse. Matt Reeves’ reimagining is similarly handsome and cerebral, much like his genre craft on the Planet Of The Apes franchise.

Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the hagiographic side.

The Duke, directed by the late Roger Michell (1956-2021), is a delight. At its heart is a towering, defining performance from Jim Broadbent and an unforgettably surprising role for Helen Mirren.

Broadbent plays a real-life character, the Newcastle taxi driver Kempton Bunton (1904-1976), who stole Francisco Goya's "Portrait of the Duke of Wellington" from the National Gallery in 1961. He returned the picture much later and also confessed to the theft.

Edmond Rostand’s familiar story of ventriloquised love becomes a sensual, sacrificial tragedy, in Joe Wright’s heady cinematic Valentine, adapted by screenwriter Erica Schmidt from her own stage musical, with music by members of The National.

La Mif is French slang for family  - it’s the cool kids practice of reversing key words known as ‘verlan’ (itself l’envers backwards) to create their own language.