Building very promisingly on the achievement of his debut feature Lilting from six years ago, in Monsoon Hong Khaou has crafted a delicate study of displacement and loss, one that’s all the more memorable for being understated. Cultural disorientation is becoming almost a trademark for the director, and it’s present in his new film in what feels a more personal context.

Mademoiselle is Jeanne Moreau, in smouldering femme fatale mode: a school-teacher and town hall secretary in a small French village, she wreaks havoc by setting fire to barns, poisoning cattle and unleashing flood waters in a farm yard full of animals. As a seemingly uptight spinster of a certain age, she is above suspicion, and the villagers cast their eye instead on a stud of an Italian woodcutter (a suitably beefy Ettore Manni), who has sent the menfolk into jealous fury by seducing their frustrated wives.

This documentary about the 1970s activist movement Rock Against Racism comes with festival prizes and much acclaim. It’s certainly a nostalgic feast for those old enough to remember when punk and reggae musicians were purposely united and it’s a timely release in the age of Grenfell, Windrush and Brexit.  

Rocks is a beautifully made slice of neo-realist filmmaking which deserves to get a wide audience but may well slip off the radar in the current climate. It really should be experienced in a cinema as the camerawork by Hélène Louvart is stunning and the sound design is excellent.

There’s something very familiar and also a little disappointing about Fanny Lye Deliver’d. Set in the years following the English Civil War, the story follows a young couple who enter the home of a stern, God-fearing family, disrupting their lives and their strict sense of right and wrong.

We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout.

Ever felt like you could express yourself more freely, if only you could get away from everything that made you who are?

British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. 

Ten years in the making, Thomas Clay’s third feature, starring Charles Dance and Maxine Peake, is a remarkable and potent example of genre-splicing British independent filmmaking. 

Simon Bird's feature film debut as a director is a gentle, warm-hearted look at a mother and son's strained relationship as they are forced to spend the summer holidays together when the teenager's dad cruelly cancels a trip to see him and his pregnant, much younger wife in Florida.