Life on the Welsh coast isn’t getting any easier: defendant Madlen was found guilty of murder, husband Evan was coming home from prison, and Faith had just given Steve Baldini a rather uncomfortable snog on the beach. She’s probably pining for that first series now, at least the hubby was out of the picture.

“Movies are all the same,” says one character in Photograph, the latest film from India independent director, Ritesh Batra. It’s true, the plot feels familiar, but if stories are all the same, it’s how you play with the form that makes a film a success or not. Batra once again shows he knows how to craft a good story. 

Our greatest Berlioz scholar, David Cairns, has called Le Damnation de Faust “an opera of the mind’s eye, not of the stage,” and I’ve certainly never seen a production that successfully staged its curious, episodic, actionless mixture of set piece, romantic brooding, and flickering cinematic imagery.

It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes.

A rambling portrait of 24 hours in the life of Double Whammies, an American sports bar where the waitresses entertain their TV-watching patrons by dressing in skimpy tops and tiny shorts. Apparently this is categorised as a ‘breastaurant’ (my spell-checker reels at this portmanteau, but there are several well-established chains in the US).

Mari is one part kitchen sink drama, one part dance performance, bringing a refreshing take on bereavement and family. Dancer Charlotte joins her mother and sister at her dying grandmother’s bedside, and tensions rise as cabin fever sets in.

With the continued prevalence of acid attacks in the UK, it was only a matter of time before they became the subject of a film. Thank goodness, then, it's handled with such unflinching care as it is in Dirty God. Director and writer Sacha Polak makes her English-language debut in this deliberate and well-paced drama.

It has been ten years since Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan first debuted I Killed My Mother at the Cannes Film Festival. A decade on he returns in competition with a title that shows an evolution of his filmmaking that leaves behind many of the problems of his previous work.

It would be great to herald this low-budget drama about an elderly drag queen and his friendship with a young gay singer-songwriter as a little gem of British indie cinema. But Tucked, which aims to be an odd-couple tale of heart-warming redemption, is pretty dispiriting with its slow pace and predictable plot. 

Who would have thought that Ken Loach could make a film more heart-wrenching than I, Daniel Blake? His new feature, co-written with his long-standing collaborator Paul Laverty, is a raw, angry and utterly uncompromising drama, showing that, for all the appeal of the gig-economy, the reality is much grimmer.