Spielberg’s new close encounter of the third kind asks for faith in humanity and extraterrestrial life which it struggles to earn, his old sense of wonder only fitfully sparking as he argues that, whether contemplating our neighbours or the cosmos, we are not alone.

Charli xcx’s cinema blitz includes seven acting roles and Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack, reinforcing her cultural ubiquity since 2024’s Brat summer. Film remains an adjunct to her sensational avant-electropop, not yet following Lady Gaga’s transition to Oscar-winner and pop part-timer. Pete Ohs’ micro-budget Erupcja anyway trades minimally on her persona, trusting her charisma to underwrite a character who credibly triggers volcanos.

Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is one of those albums that transcends its genre; it’s not only the best-selling jazz solo album of all time, but the best-selling piano album of any kind. And aside from its almost transcendental quality, this success reflects the mythical reputation of the one-off concert that it records.

Steve Martin famously said that writing about music was like trying to dance architecture, so maybe making a movie about painting is like – I don’t know – trying to chant ceramics. But this Britain-New Zealand co-production has a go at following in the footsteps of films such as The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), both of which got us more than half-interested in the deeply mundane and scarily intense business of daubing paint.

Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan) has, he says, painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20. In the Sixties he was a major star of the British art scene. Now he’s reduced to making personalised video messages for fans (apparently he still has plenty), wearing a blue beret for an authentically artistic look. £149 a pop, £249 “if I sign”.

If you seek a filmmaker to create the fine grain of 20th-century Europe at its most traumatised, you can’t do better than Hungary’s László Nemes. The textures of his grinding Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (2015), are hard to dispel from the mind. His new film is set in a broken Budapest a year after the failed uprising against communism in 1956, and anyone with even a folk memory of the 1950s will recognise the scruffy streets, weathered rooms and dilapidated lifestyle items of that time.

Anyone who learned to love Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (let alone his stints with Ben Stiller and Larry Sanders) was surely wrong-footed (but in a good way) when he appeared as a reclusive but lethal all-action dynamo in Nobody and Nobody 2. It was as if somebody had cast Harry Enfield as Ethan Hunt.

In a notable case of nominative determinism, the 2025 film about a kabuki star, Kokuho – meaning “national treasure” – became just that in Japan, a box-office smash. The keening voices and ultra-stylised mannerisms of the genre are not staples of Western entertainment, so a three-hour feature film about a kabuki actor sounds like a tough proposition here. But the time is well spent and flies past.

Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product.  

Carla Simón’s latest autofiction disinters the post-Franco plague of heroin and AIDS which killed her parents and that of Marina (Llúcia Garcia), her indefatigable 18-year-old surrogate in this lyrical story of shame, memory and love.