Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground as a sensitive child.

Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in style, without ever being pretentious, the coming-of age story it vividly tells so engaging, and the performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud so thrilling, that it remains fresh and relevant to this day.

The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was.

Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss of her archeologist husband five years before, Loretta has been sent on a book-signing tour by her manager, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, giving it both barrels).

With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).

Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).

Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably that of Hiroo Onoda.

Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his ruinous machismo, is clueless. The steps – based on love, desire, avarice, jealousy, manipulation and anger – make for a discomfiting coming-of-age drama that won the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year.

"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.