The restrictiveness of conventional gender identities explains the extreme body horror of Titane, in which a pregnant rookie firefighter frequently invoked as Jesus bleeds car oil from her vagina and from the stigmatic splits in her swollen belly. The miracle of Julia Doucournau’s luridly beautiful Palme d’Or-winner is that the memory of the violence puncturing the film's first half recedes as loving tenderness takes hold.

Back in 1999, The Matrix offered something revolutionary. With a heady brew of William Gibson-influenced cyberpunk, Platonic philosophy and Prada, it proved that blockbusters could be both smart and action-packed. Remember those days? 

“It was the hand of God,” says the Neapolitan family patriarch about a rather unexpected consequence of Maradona's coming to play for the city’s team. That gives us a date, 1984, and, while the adolescent protagonist Fabietto remains in Naples, a fleeting sense of time and place.

A brief warning to readers: while effort is made to avoid spoilers, I would advise anyone who has somehow missed the massive amount of online speculation about the film’s plot to not read on. See the film first, and please come back. 

The story of a woman with lung cancer that has metastasised to the brain is based on Norwegian director Maria Sødahl's own experience, which is a hopeful sign in itself. But you take nothing for granted in this honest, beautiful movie, which never strays into sentimental terminal-romance territory and is shot by Lars von Trier's regular DP Manuel Alberto Claro,

The archetypal fascinating male in Jane Campion’s films – whether his allure for a woman owes to his earthy virility or emotional sensitivity, his animal appeal or his soul – has a malign other.

Though sexual hypocrisy in modern-day Romania is the ostensible target of Bad Lack Banging or Loony Porn – a satirical drama that enfolds a scattershot polemic – Radu Jude’s tenth film is broadly concerned with the nation’s all-enveloping post-Communist malaise. Nationalism, fascism, militarism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and capitalism are all grist for the mill in this withering provocation.

Based fairly closely on Sally Wainwright’s 2009 ITV series Unforgiven, The Unforgivable replaces the former’s star Suranne Jones with Sandra Bullock and has airlifted the action from Yorkshire to Seattle.

Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder.

In the first 35 minutes of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s three-hour Drive My Car, which the Japanese director adapted with Oe Takamasa from a story in Murakami Haruku’s Men Without Women collection, the successful actor Kafuku Yūsuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi) endures experiences that would derail a less stoical man.