Tunisian lives unfold over a working day in Erige Sehiri’s debut Under the Fig Trees, with fig-picking the backdrop to furtive, sparking collisions between men and women. Love, liberation and oppression all take their turn under the sun as community is strengthened or challenged, and a society is subtly implied.

Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of  "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke.

Full Time opens in darkness. All we can hear is the sound of a sleeping woman breathing. It’s one of the few quiet moments in a film that follows Julie (Laure Calamy) as she scrambles to manage her life. Divorced with two young children, she lives in a village and commutes to Paris. It’s still dark when she drops off her kids with an elderly child minder and it’s dark again when she picks them up after a long day’s work in the city. 

Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.

Wandering the wrecked streets of Memphis in search of blues and rock history, two teenage Japanese tourists debate who and what’s better: Elvis Presley vs. Carl Perkins, the sleek ultramodernity of their hometown Yokohoma vs. the “vintage” charms of a nearly deserted Tennessee train station.

Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job  (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable ordeals on the long road of existence only to be met at the end by the Broadway legend Patti LuPone?

Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.

Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.

This almost forgotten, naturalistic 1976 road movie lets four young Frenchmen off the leash in a cross-country trip from Lille to Cannes.

It’s not a great moment for older audiences contemplating an outing to the cinema. They could have their intelligence insulted with the feeble, sugary comedy, Book Club: The Next Chapter or they could choose Plan 75 and find themselves looking nervously over their shoulder. This debut feature by Chie Hayakawa is a sombre drama set not too far in the future.