Whether grinding or eerie, bellicose or plaintive, the exquisite jazz- and classical-infused prog rock dirges disgorged by King Crimson over the last 54 years stand apart from the more accessible sounds made by their illustrious peers, including Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Curved Air, and ELP. Given the discomfiting aesthetic of Crimson’s music – a fulminating anti-panacea, relentlessly modernistic – is it any wonder there was much misery in its making?

Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.

All the best sports movies are about more than just sport: the core might be friendship, romance, the battle against discrimination, the importance of following your dreams, of self-realisation and fulfilment, of fighting the corporate machine, of David v Goliath. Admirable themes, all. 

Sometimes one admires a film without wholly loving it because the high level of craft displayed on screen holds at arms’ length emotional engagement with the story. LOLA is that kind of movie – an ingeniously devised tale of time-travel, set in 1941 and replete with World War Two newsreels that have been altered with all the digital skills its makers could summon.

This is a Hamlet for fans of speed-dating. It comes in at just over the two-hour mark, which is standard for a feature film. But considering the uncut text runs to four hours, as it did in the 1996 Kenneth Branagh film (and his earlier stage production), big chunks of text have clearly gone missing.

"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.

In the Middle profiles 10 football officials who referee and run the line of lower-league games in south-west London and north-east Surrey. Pondering what drives these apparently sane individuals to do such an onerous job, director-producer Greg Cruttwell's documentary is a vibrant study in diversity and concomitant prejudice that benefits from his light touch.

May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.

Here in Europe we mainly see subtle, lyrical Iranian films, targeted at international festivals or art house audiences, so it’s great to get the chance to see Law of Tehran, a gritty and relentless police thriller that was a hit in its home country in 2019.  

There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see it as a perfect locale for tales of human emotion in extremis, from David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter to Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. Perhaps it’s the tension between political discontent, privation and the gorgeous landscape that unsettles people, makes them behave badly.