One of the most extraordinary time-travel films of recent years takes George MacKay and his co-star Callum Turner aboard a spooky fishing boat. Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada is as much a magical cinematic experience as it is a haunting ghost story about grief and loss - and a lesson in suspense that uses limitations to amazing effect.

Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.

The main female characters in Christian Petzold’s films are kindred spirits – sisters in subversiveness.

Cate Blanchett is not a diva, but a star. Thanks to her boundless versatility and yen for risk-taking, she's at home in arthouse films as she is in Hollywood blockbusters. The greatest secret of her appeal is her elusiveness: she's always fully present and yet strangely ethereal at the same time – whether she's playing a character like Lydia Tár (in Tár) or Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies.

François Ozon has typically filtered his version of Albert Camus's existential novella The Stranger through his cool, ironic sensibility, the film's fluidity recalling at times the raw poetry of Fellini's and Pasolini's early

Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.

In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. 

Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab caused an international outcry at last year's Venice film festival – a fact that the Oscar-nominated Tunisian director prefers to play down. "I'm a director. I don't usually like to talk about my films," she said. But this time was different. There was an unusually heavy burden of responsibility.

Actors who play someone with Tourette syndrome have to take a huge step out of their comfort zone. Robert Aramayo accepted that challenge when he was cast as John Davidson in I Swear.

The first time you see Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value you want to catch her, hug her, slap her (as her character requests), or do anything to calm her down. 

Reinsve plays Nora, an actress suffering from horrific stage fright moments before she steps on stage in front of an audience to play the lead in a new play. Nora doesn’t fear failing; she passed that point some time ago. What freaks her out is the risk of losing control over her deepest emotions and being reminded of her vulnerability.