A decade ago Romanian director Cristian Mungiu took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a gruelling abortion drama set in the dying days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The cold intensity of that film made it a key work in the remarkable movement that came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, which directed a pitiless eye at the reality of the country as it struggled to throw off the burden of decades of Communism.    

Back at Cannes last year with his new film Graduation (Bacalaureat), Mungiu won the Best Director award. Graduation is set in the present day – even if not much has changed in the bleakly monotone world Mungiu depicts, mobile phones excepted – and allows us to guess at the director’s verdict on the intervening period. It’s a far from optimistic prognosis: his experience has made him sad.

To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy

At least that is the impression we receive from the hero of his film. Romeo Altea (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged hospital physician, tired beyond his years, brought down by the everyday business of living. He is in a relationship with a younger woman but struggles to end his unhappy marriage to wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), who looks like a catatonic wraith (Adrian Titieni with Lia Bugnar, pictured below). The only beacon of hope – clearly one Romeo has been tending for years – is their daughter Eliza (Maria Drăguş).

She is the apple of the family eye, and her father is almost over-protective of her. Now on the cusp of independence, Eliza has won a scholarship to study in the UK (Cambridge, no less), which will realise her parents’ dreams about her finding a place in a better world, and leaving the dour reality of her homeland behind forever.

All that remains is for her to get the necessary grades at her school exams, which should be a formality. But cruel circumstance – I’m not sure if in Mungiu’s world that’s exactly the same thing as “fate” – intervenes. The day before, she’s attacked outside school and narrowly avoids being raped. Badly shaken, her right arm in plaster, her future suddenly looks less assured: the shock may cause her to fail the tests. Her father is distraught – he didn’t drop her off in the usual place, and in some way feels partly responsible – and will resort to anything to assure his daughter’s future.That means resorting to all the ruses of corruption offered by the world in which he lives; given his position as a doctor, they are plentiful. He’s close friends anyway with the police inspector investigating the case, which offers a natural referral to the deputy mayor – he’s in urgent need of an operation – who in turn is owed a favour by the school’s headmaster (so persuading the examiners shouldn't be a problem).

But Altea faces an inexorable choice. By going down that route, relying on such connections (and involving his daughter in the process), he’s negating all the values he has instilled in Eliza. There’s double cruelty in the fact that there is no other way out: the scholarship just can’t be held over, regardless of what has happened. And double irony given that such string-pulling was the natural way in the old, communist order, when you battled the system – it was how the doctor himself escaped military service in his youth, we learn. Now, even without any money changing hands, it’s the kind of corruption that the regime has set out to eradicate (recent street protests in Romania remind us how real such concerns are there). As the immediate ramifications of Eliza’s exams gain wider prominence, even the anti-corruption investigators admit to Altea that he isn’t really their target (they are the first to admit that as a doctor he doesn’t take bribes, or “incentives” as they are referred to at one point).It’s a deeply forlorn canvas, as if Mungiu, a generation after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, confirms that his protagonists just can’t escape the rites and habits of the world that formed them. It achieves extra poignancy when Romeo and Magda remember how they returned home – we presume, from abroad – in 1991, the year in which Romania received its new constitution, with a conviction that they could contribute to building a new way of life in their homeland (“we thought we’d move mountains”).

That idealism may have long disappeared, but at least their conviction that something different was available to Eliza elsewhere remained (even if their faith in Britain as such an ideal world seems a tad naïve). That disillusionment, somehow intricately connected to middle age, is compounded by Romeo’s shattering, yet somehow unacknowledged sadness that he must leave his marriage behind. His wife knows all about Sandra (Malina Manovici), the younger woman with whom he has found some new happiness, but has herself chosen to postpone any resolution of that question until after their daughter’s departure.

To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy. Graduation is his first film with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru, but the muted colours look familiar, as are the depressing exteriors of a world that is somehow untended (the film’s opening shot shows a dug-up street: we wonder whether Mungiu is preparing to delve deeper into his world, or has already dug its grave). The director adheres to his past credo of using music only when it is actually playing on radio or CD, his chosen register the luminous melancholy of the countertenor repertoire, devastatingly expressive when we encounter it in Handel’s “Ombra mai fù” or Purcell’s “Cold Song” (a Mungiu title, if ever there was one).

And yet… Eliza may yet confound her parents’ expectations (and fears). The final graduation photograph shows a bunch of young people not so different from any other (pictured, above: Eliza, below centre): the director even allows a popular Romanian song to accompany his closing titles. The playing throughout is superb, which speaks for so much in itself: Graduation has a paradoxical poise in its execution that just can’t be entirely groundless. If Mungiu’s tool, like that of his medical hero, is a scalpel, hope remains that the operation may not prove in vain. But what a gruelling journey.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Graduation

Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.

Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco – who refuses to be evicted from the apartment in which she has spent her life, the parallels with the presidency were striking. While it brought the film extra attention the situation didn’t play exclusively to its advantage. First it received an unjustified 18 certificate (later adjusted), then it was controversially overlooked for Brazil’s Best Foreign Film Oscar entry.

'Aquarius' certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom 

Filho is certainly a director alert to politics, at least with a small “p”. His debut feature Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 was an elliptical picture of his homeland through the microcosm of a small urban environment. It depicted contemporary Brazil as carrying considerable historical baggage, caught between tradition and modernity: one dividing line was drawn around real estate – low-rise, old style versus high-rise, new style.

That distinction is at the heart of Aquarius, but there’s nothing abstract in the way it’s portrayed. Its heroine, played with wonderful aplomb by Brazilian star Sonia Braga, has spent her life, at least as far back as the 1980 flashback with which the film begins, in a spacious apartment in a three-storey building – its name gives the film its title – overlooking the beach. Its interior is packed with the accumulations of a life richly lived – now 65, Clara was a music critic, whose broad tastes range from Brazil’s great native composer Heiror Villa-Lobos to Queen (her vinyl collection is enormous).

That opening episode shows the younger Clara (played by Barbara Colen) as a free spirit, driving her car on the beach, music playing loud; she is gamine, her hair cropped close, as opposed to the flowing tresses that are so much part of her later personality (the film is divided into three loose parts, this opener titled “Clara’s hair”). The main business of the episode, though, is a celebration party for her much-loved Aunt Lucia, another independent soul whose life spans back into earlier eras of Brazil’s history, who never married, and spent time in prison (a clear political allusion).

Aquarius certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom, and the camera relishes a chest of drawers, as Filho fills in its particular history with flashbacks to Lucia’s own youthful sexual passion. It highlights the sense that life is an accretion of such memories, such precious objects. Thus, the associations of Clara's building are incomparably richer than the skyscraper that would be put up in its place.

Clara's husband and three children are at the centre of that celebration, and through them we learn that she has successfully battled cancer (her mastectomy features later). By the next part, she is widowed, her children grown up and living their own lives, with attitudes that do not always accord with those of their mother. .

Filho weaves a rich tapestry with his feisty, forthright heroine in centre place, surrounded by a host of other characters. There’s her long-serving housekeeper Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto, prompting reflection on the divides, class-based and racial, that characterise Brazilian society); her wider family (pictured top), including a favourite nephew; the newspaper connections from her earlier career that will assist at a crucial moment; even the lifeguard on the beach who supervises her morning swim, with whom Clara has a long and affectionate friendship, and whose help will also prove useful (beach scene, pictured above). Above all there is the company of a wider group of women friends, with whom she congregates at a dance evening early on in the film; it’s a lovely, laughing, gossipy atmosphere which reveals, among other things, that this is a generation for whom sexuality remains very much a thing of the present.

At close on two and a half hours, 'Aquarius' is a languid film

Filho portrays it as an organic world whose natural habits and routines are threatened by the prospect of its physical locus, the Aquarius building, being destroyed. The director makes the lead player in the company trying to redevelop it the grandson of its original proprietor, adding another generational element to the story; we sense that if the older man somehow fitted into the accepted order, the younger one, slick with the new confidence of a US Business Studies degree, plays by new rules. The variety of methods to which he resorts is inventive, their impact most unsettling for the way that they reverberate uneasily in Clara’s dreams. The ending is left open, with Clara’s cancer – those two words are the title of the film's closing episode – assuming a somehow symbolic quality. If cancer destroys the body from within, Filho makes explicit parallels to the destruction of Clara’s building, but also refers to her wider society (in Brazilian terms, by the almost insuperable entity that is capitalism and politics combined).

At close on two and a half hours, Aquarius is a languid film, lovingly enjoying its length, and blessed with a simply glorious performance from Braga. Physically she stands out, high cheekbones, a balletically slim form, and the hair, either falling loose or tied tightly over her head. It’s combined with such keenness of intelligence, such a sense of strength intermingled with vulnerability, such depth of character. Estupenda!

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Aquarius

Translating terrorism is tricky. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student is an adaptation of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg which was staged in London two years ago under its original title, Martyr. One exchange in this story (which is set in and around a school) references what might happen if Christian extremists pursued their beliefs with a fervour we associate more with militant Islam. The two concepts don’t quite combine in English as they did in Russian, which used the title (M)Uchennik, a play on the two words which caught the associations of both.

Serebrennikov is known in his homeland as much as a stage director as for his film work – The Student is his sixth feature, and premiered at Cannes last year – and he first staged the play at the theatre which he runs in Moscow (casting partly repeats). He has not only adapted the work for screen, but clearly shaped the German original into a Russian context, most notably that of the Orthodox religion. It gives a sharp accent to an issue – the relation between state and Church, of concurrent official ideologies – that has become particularly acute in Russia this century.

Exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles 

All of which makes the film’s teenage protagonist Venya (Pyotr Skvortsov, sulkily intense, main picture) something of a contradiction. His adolescent rebellion, against both his mother and the school authorities, can’t be dismissed in the usual way because his protests are on fundamentalist religious grounds, and he cites the Bible, chapter and verse, to prove his points (exact references, to both Old and New Testament, appear as screen titles).

His single mother (Julia Aug), perpetually exhausted and working in three jobs, clearly loves him, but doesn’t have a clue what to do with a son who’s become practically a stranger (a normal teenager, in her book, would be “collecting stamps and jerking off all the time”). More enterprising is the approach taken by the school’s progressive biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova, giving a highly intelligent performance; pictured, below, left, with Julia Aug, right), who sees Venya’s stubbornness as some sort of cry for help, and initially tries to approach him more sympathetically.

But the dynamic between the two moves towards conflict. When she teaches sex education – including information about homosexuality, another highly sensitive issue in Russia these days – he strips naked and rampages around the classroom, meeting her explanations about contraception with fire-and-brimstone injunctions to “be fruitful and replenish the earth”. Lessons about Darwinism are countered by his dressing in a guerrilla costume and preaching creationism.

Even the priest who is attached to the school is defeated by the phenomenon, his attempts to co-opt the teenager into the official structures of religion countered by accusations about the Church’s venality, its attachment to palaces and Mercedes rather than its duty to “bring fire to the earth”. The things notably lacking in Venya’s worldview, however, are charity and love, highlighted particularly in his interaction with Grisha (Alexander Gorchilin, pictured below with Skvortsov), the bullied outcast of the class who latches on to his charismatic contemporary for his own reasons.

Venya sees Grisha not as a friend but almost as a disciple (which was, in fact, an alternative title for the film). Grisha has one leg shorter than the other, so Venya doesn’t hesitate to call him a cripple (Christ, we are reminded, sought out the cripples and the outcasts). Trying to extend the shorter leg becomes something of a ritual test of faith, as Venya intones “Grow, leg” over his companion’s half-naked torso; for the other boy, hands and half-naked torsos hint at something else altogether. The disillusionment will be painful.

Scenes like that reveal that The Student has plenty of very dark comedy, although you’d need an audience on the right wavelength to extract it (and some may well be lost in translation). The antics of the school’s headmistress and some of her proteges are conveyed with a pronounced degree of satire. Serebrennikov’s first significant feature, Playing the Victim, from a decade ago, another adaptation from the stage, also had a central figure who didn’t fit into the world around him, and was also gloriously rich in black comedy – but the mood in his new work is somehow darker, more desperate.

It’s felt especially in a very uneasy score from composer Ilya Demutsky, which uses strained, sometimes atonal string writing to intersperse episodes and set the emotional tone (it’s much more nuanced than repeated closing use of Slovenian heavy-metallers Laibach’s anthem “God Is God”). There’s something somehow detached to Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography, too, working largely with long shots and controlling colour and light impeccably. Filmed in Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic, there’s virtually nothing that identifies the location as specifically Russian – rather it’s a somehow generalised small-town atmosphere, visually interchangeable perhaps for Scandinavia or other coastal northern climes.

That quality – of being very Russian in spirit, while presenting an environment that in itself is not distinctly Russian at all – could not help but recall Andrei Zvyagintsev, especially his first film, The Return. And comparisons for The Student are also appropriate with Zvyagintsev’s latest, Leviathan. Both films are saying that something is somehow very much not right in the society in which they are set, but whereas Leviathan unfolded on an almost epic scale, Serebrennikov’s film speaks in a more minor key, its dramatic action more muted (and its script, arguably, on the wordy side). The Student doesn’t make wide assertions about morality, instead it probes – teases, even – around issues of values (religion being, after all, among the deepest of all). It’s an uneasy film, one that leaves a somehow bitter taste behind.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Student

The end of empire has rarely looked more cinematically beguiling than in Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, the visually lavish 1992 drama written for Catherine Deneuve, who gets the film’s epigraphic line about “believing that the world is made of things that are inseparable: men and women, the mountains and the plains, human beings and gods, Indochina and France…” Substitute Communism for “gods” in this somewhat faux-glamourised depiction of an independe

Stéphane Brizé’s film is about the grubby tyranny and humiliation of working life. Middle-aged Thierry (Vincent Lindon, Best Actor at Cannes and the Césars) has a hangdog face which fails to mask his anger after being unjustly laid off. He seems traumatised, tense. And every time he attempts to work, more self-respect is chiselled from him. At the job centre, or in an unexpected interview by Skype, his manner, posture and age are picked over as if he’s raw material or a coat on a rack, not a human being. Thierry lacks, he is told, “amiability”.

Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and divided the critics. The French and Americans loved it, while hard-nosed British critics scoffed. 

When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.

There are moments in observational documentary that sometimes seem to rise to the drama of fictional cinema, and Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Poslednata lineika na Sofia) has plenty such. They come when the viewer becomes in some way so engrossed in what is on screen that the standard distinctions of form seem to be lost.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?

You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.