What a strange little film, uncertain if it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or a comedic poke at the shibboleths of psychoanalysis, A Private Life is definitively a vehicle for Jodie Foster, comèdienne. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature is a punkish, gothic, genre-dancing, feminist riot, whose verve, imagination and serious intent don’t really need the enforcement of an exclamation mark. If an extremely enjoyable film suffers from anything, it might be a tendency to overegg.

Scream’s commentary on and sly revival of the slasher genre was a phenomenon in the ironic Nineties. If any franchise is alive to the absurdity of six sequels it’s this one, where self-aware characters eagerly annotate evolving horror cliché. The latest “meta-slasher whodunnit”, though, as Scream (2022) handily had it, hasn’t put the requisite thought into justifying its existence.

Cinema has a deep distrust of the devout. Even though many movie types are tied up in all sorts of personal spiritual pursuits, organised religion often gets a rough ride in Hollywood and beyond. Lately, though, characters of faith have been getting better PR. In the recent Argentine film Belén, the protagonist – a battler against abortion injustice – nods repeatedly to God. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery endorses the deep grace of a young priest as virtually its controlling idea, while even Avatar: Fire and Ash has its own woo-woo supreme being.

We’ve heard of dad rock, but how about dad techno? This Spanish movie, directed by the French-born Oliver Laxe, immerses us in one of Europe’s more curious subcultures – ravers who decamp by the horde to North Africa to party day and night in the desert. But these are not a familiar Ibiza crowd: most are 30-plus, and one or two look as though they might go back to the Second Summer of Love of the late 1980s.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s semi-satirical new thriller looks back with sorrow and ambiguous nostalgia at the Wild West that Brazil became during the 1964-85 military dictatorship. Mendonça set The Secret Agent during 1977, when he was eight, and he has filtered his memories into its world of casual killings and endemic corruption.

When the protagonist of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You hears herself described as "stretchable, like putty”, her whole body stiffens in protest. Driven to near insanity by the demands of her mental health counselling job and her young daughter's mysterious illness, Linda is all raw nerves and quick recoil – a mother on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her? Barely a few minutes into the movie, the ceiling of her small flat collapses in a flood of water and plaster, and that's just the start of her travails.

There's little reason to arrive early at the cinema these days, now that filmgoers are forced to endure as many advertisements as movie trailers. Once upon a time, though, the animated Looney Tunes were essential viewing before the main movie event. Now, 90 years after the first Looney Tunes short appeared, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig star in the franchise's first full-length feature.

Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad.

Bart Layton’s class-conscious pulp fiction gives Chris Hemsworth his most convincing lead role since Thor as Mike Davis, an LA jewel thief on one last job while tentatively facing his hollow life. An all-star cast including Marvel compadre Mark Ruffalo, pictured bottom right, and Halle Berry happily sink into character parts to give the familiar heist set-up flesh and bone.