This fifth feature from Claire Denis must surely be the director’s most sheerly concentrated film.

The only thing confusing with Les Misérables is its pointedly provocative title, as there are no costumed urchins and no singing involved. Searching online to find the UK cinemas where it’s playing this week entails a trek past the execrable 2012 musical of the same name, but it’s well worth tracking down a screen that's showing this exhilarating and intelligent new film.

This sober French space movie is concerned with what a female astronaut leaves behind on Earth, not what she finds in the cosmic dark. Sarah (Eva Green) has been selected for a European Space Agency mission towards Mars, realising a childhood dream. Punishing training prepares her for separation from Earth, and from eight-year-old daughter Stella (Zelié Boulant-Lemesle).

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18^th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany.

The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema.

With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. 

It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Lest anyone believe that Parasite was the only ground-breaking foreign language film of the past year, Céline Sciamma’s fourth feature, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, arrives to remind us otherwise.

This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule.

It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about.