The release of Call Jane could not be more timely, just as the American midterms loom and liberals reel from the overturning of legislation that allow women access to safe and legal abortions in the US. This well-crafted drama tells the true story of a group of women in 1960s Chicago who ran a secret organisation that provided almost 12,000 terminations when to do so was a criminal offence. 

Causeway is being heralded as Jennifer Lawrence’s return to the kind of low-budget, low-key films that first brought her to critics’ attention, before the megastardom of The Hunger Games franchise. It’s also the first film that Lawrence has produced, with theatre director Lila Neugebauer taking the helm.  

In 1970, the coffin of America’s new vampire count travels to his lair in the hills of LA on a pickup truck. A giant billboard for John Wayne in True Grit observes his passage through Hollywood’s urban bustle, as this Gothic monster enters the then modern world.

Ruben Östlund builds theatres of cruelty for the elite, petri dishes for pretension and hypocrisy. After Force Majeure’s family implosion at a ski resort and The Square’s art crowd Armageddon, Triangle of Sadness casts off with a superyacht which becomes a vomitorium when it hits choppy waters, in his second consecutive Palme d’Or-winner.

The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to the male-dominated art world.

The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its London-based star Ava Gardner.

Vesper is a piece of arty European sci-fi, filmed in the forests of Lithuania (homeland of co-director Kristina Buozyte) and set in a dystopian future conjured up by its French co-director Bruno Samper (a "digital experience designer"). The two collaborated in 2012 on Vanishing Waves, which was the first Lithuanian sci-fi film to play in the US, won awards on the festival circuit, and came with quite a lot of explicit erotica.

In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.

Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.

The London Film Festival ended with the announcement of assorted prizes, all well-deserved. My colleague Demetrios Matheou has already written here about the Chilean political thriller, 1976, which won Best First Feature, and we’ll be writing in depth about the  Best Film winner, the Austrian historical drama Corsage, when it opens at the end of the year.