Much has been made of Martin Scorsese’s recent dismissal of Marvel films. Putting that debate aside, there’s no escaping the fact that in an era of rapid-fire sequels, with the same ensembles trotted out year after year, there’s far more frisson to be felt when the reunion is after not one or two, but 25 years – and what the filmmakers are seeking to recreate really is movie magic. 

In the opening scene of Alejandro Landes’s strange, beautiful but finally unsatisfying Monos, eight teenage guerrillas are playing football blindfold on a high mountain plateau. Why the blindfolds? Perhaps to warn us not to expect any light to be thrown on whys and wherefores in this unsettling, visually stunning film, with its echoes of Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now.

Sentient machines have taken over the Earth. The leader of the human rebellion is so effective that a robotic ‘terminator’ is sent back in time to ensure he’s never born. A guardian follows, to ensure he is. We’ve been here before. 

“Every now and then the country goes a little wrong”: so goes one of the many lyrics from the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins that makes this 1990 Off Broadway musical (subsequently chosen to open Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse in 1992) a piece of theatre very much for our time. Some shows need textual tweaking when they come around again but not this one.

Like recent films about the Anders Breivik terror attacks in Norway, Hotel Mumbai unavoidably raises questions of taste. Do audiences really need to be subjected to harrowing recreations of real-life suffering, when the events themselves are still fresh? However it does offer one very moving justification, which is to honour the courage that invariably surfaces during such carnage.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) wouldn’t have any luck at all. Being an Iraq special forces veteran jailed for protecting his wife in a bar fight seems wretched karma enough.

A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare ride, starting with Catfishman. “I catfish females.

“All this evil and dark crap was supposed to be fun,” complains exasperated Norwegian black metal overlord Euronymous, played by Rory Culkin, as his world spirals out of control in a cataclysm of murder, suicide and church burnings. The true events that inspired Lords of Chaos are some of the most bizarre and twisted in the history of popular music. Fun they are not. Freakish, depressing and horrific, certainly.

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.

Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.