Director Charlie McDowell's The Summer Book is a beautiful, somewhat wistful film that follows the residents of a tiny Finnish island (daughter, father, grandmother) over a summer. The father (Anders Danielsen Lie, of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value) is mourning the death of his wife, whilst his mother (Glenn Close) provides brisk, no-nonsense comfort, and his daughter, Sophia (Emily Matthews), struggles to come to terms with her new life and the loss it involves.

Tom Holland is 30 now, and after a decade in the role his boyish Spider-Man muscularly comes of age in this fourth solo outing.

“Ish” is the name of the lead character in this movie, but it also might be a suffix attached to adjectives describing it. Here we have a sparkish piece full of smallish moments in a quietish town that’s typically dullish and British. For 12-year-old Ish, life is somewhere around okayish.

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.