The world was captivated by the Arab Spring – thousands of citizens rising up in unity against longstanding dictatorships, filling squares and refusing to bow. But for many of us, it was a world away; the crowds were a single organism, thinking and acting as one. What The Nile Hilton Incident does incredibly well is create the feeling of being an individual on those streets: placing you in that simmering cauldron, a city on the edge.

The Ciambra is a wonderful and subtle piece of filmmaking. Director/writer Jonas Carpignano captures the genuine heart and fire of family relationships with an amateur cast of relatives, led by the magnetic young Pio Amato. By trusting the audience to find the subtext themselves, they create touching and persuasive cinema over two hours.

Interactive stories are a tricky proposition. Make the on-screen action too passive and your audience feels like they’re watching a succession of cut-scenes. Tip the balance the other way and it’s just a game with pretensions of cinematic story telling. The idea that every decision you make in-game, whether it’s a dialogue choice or an action, will ultimately affect the outcome of the story is a bold ambition.

Inside Tully – or maybe inside Charlize Theron’s massively pregnant belly – is a darker, more daring film trying to get out. There are startlingly original moments, but it’s as if writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, creators of Juno and Young Adult, chickened out in the end and plumped for whimsy and sentiment.

Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric).

Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).

AUGUST

The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.

Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes.

Anyone who expected a simple robots-versus-humans confrontation, like in Michael Crichton's original Westworld movie from 1973, had another think, or bunch of thinks, coming. The final episode of the Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams Westworld was more like a sci-fi manifesto for a post-human world.

Most of us like a good legal drama, which is why there have been so many of them. By the same logic, finding a fresh spin or a new way of writing and shooting them inevitably grows ever-tougher.