This genial oddity – its pithier French title is Complètement Cramé, meaning something along the lines of completely burnt out – stars John Malkovich and Fanny Ardant and is directed by best-selling author Gilles Legardinier, who adapted it from his own novel. Its goofiness works, some of the time, partly because of Malkovich’s French, which is fluent yet delivered in a halting drawl with an English/American accent so bad it’s almost good.

British audiences of a certain age will note Finis Terrae’s similarity to Finisterre, one of the 31 sea areas listed in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Or previously listed – it was renamed Fitzroy in 2002 to avoid confusion with another Finisterre off the coast of Spain.

Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.

The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.

“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his deceased mentor Jean-Pierre, the film’s ambiguous ending suggests he might still share it with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Unless or until the gendarmes come calling.

“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”

François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).

Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry Léa Seydoux) just before the half-way mark. It's just another line from a script.

Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.