“Do you have a problem with old dykes?” demands Nina (the superbly ferocious Barbara Sukowa) of a bland, nervous young estate agent, halfway through this wonderfully original first feature from director Filippo Meneghetti. No, he stammers. “You see, no one gives a damn, except you, Mado,” she hisses at her secret lover Madeleine (Martine Chevallier).

The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.

Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) to Paris, Pfeiffer informs the character of the mortality-obsessed Frances Price with an implicit "meow", as if forever finding fault with a world in which, short of funds, she is now surplus to requirements.

Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels.

Jean-Luc Godard’s film-making career, a restless quest for a cinema that questions the medium as well as its place in the social and political context, is both astonishingly prolific and unique. Rarely drawing directly on autobiographical themes, sometimes refusing to be credited as the sole director, he nevertheless remains the most personally driven of all the stars of the French New Wave.

David Hockney has a new toy, an app designed specially for him that allows him to work on an iPad with fine brushes. He spent the first five months of lockdown In Normandy making daily records of the coming of spring; the results are displayed in a large show at the Royal Academy (★★). Seamless animation turns his still images into a continuum.

"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce”. In layman’s terms, it is the art of decorative painting, the technique of creating an optical illusion whereby a surface appears three-dimensional. It’s also the subject of this book.

Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature.

Chances are many will not have heard of Gojira. At best, as a music lover, theirs may be a name seen among the line-up of metal festivals. As ever with metal, perceived as niche but with a vast audience, this is misleading. Gojira are globally successful, quarter of century into their career, with proper hit albums under their belt. They are also that rare thing, a French heavy metal band.

The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of brevity, we’ll call Loony Porn.