E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s film was a surprise hit at Cannes last year, winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. It’s a ghost story that wears its genre trappings lightly, because it isn’t a regular ghost story at all. None of the usual shock tactics are deployed; instead, an offbeat whimsical humour guides the narrative, to an unlikely destination.

Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow.

The man who made Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer can hardly be accused of not thinking big. Now, with The Odyssey, he’s thinking epic. Clocking in at a whisker under three hours and peppered with bankable stars, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s imperishable poem is a bold attempt to recreate the ancient world of the 12th Century BC, with its gods, monsters and all. And it's the first feature film to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras. 

The regular scriptwriter for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, Efthimis Filippou, has worked with another director, Karim Aïnouz, on Rosebush Pruning. It’s a film that bills itself as “inspired by” Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 satire, Fists in the Pocket, but deals in the same kind of lurid surrealism as Lanthimos’s off-kilter yarns.

Two couples meet up for an apparently convivial meal, except that there’s a minefield under their feet. And when they trigger an explosion, one of the couples will be left trying to pick up the pieces. 

For factual footage from battle zones, we once used to rely on people toting heavy cameras who went in and out of the fields of war. The successors to news camera legends like Mohamed Amin and Rory Peck are still with us, but the most immersive, longitudinal studies are now in the hands of citizen journalists with iPhones and Sony Alphas. They patch together Oscar-winning gonzo docs from terabytes of footage kept under the bed.

It’s a big ask of an audience to watch a film which for most of its two hour running time, focuses on just two actors, even when they are doing their best work.  It’s impossible to fault Woody Norman, the young British actor who first attracted praise on C’mon C’mon. Here he is playing 13-year-old Roy, a sensitive London schoolboy with a mop of unruly dark curls and expressive dark eyes. His parents’ relationship is long over when he takes up his estranged French father’s invitation to live for  a year on an uninhabited island in the Norwegian fjords. 

How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.

Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.

Modesty is the last refuge of fantasy franchises once too big to fail. Much like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Captain America: Brave New World, Supergirl is a scaled-back sf story with minor-league villains and a manageable quest. Two films into James Gunn’s DC Extended Universe reboot, it already feels like a fill-in.