Forty years after Alien made a star out of Sigourney Weaver, comes a documentary that goes into forensic detail about the movie’s original writer and monstrous imagery but barely mentions its lead actor despite the fact that her portrayal of Ripley broke all the stereotypes of women in sci-fi.

Joanna Hogg’s melancholy autobiographical drama The Souvenir cuts too close to the bone. That’s a compliment: like Sally Rooney’s equally unsettling first novel Conversations With Friends, Hogg’s movie almost forces the viewer to relive that shattering early romance, founded on collusion and self-delusion, that reordered her or his universe for all time.

If it wasn’t for bad luck, Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) wouldn’t have any luck at all. Being an Iraq special forces veteran jailed for protecting his wife in a bar fight seems wretched karma enough.

As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new.

There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again.

Guillermo del Toro considered directing this adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s bestselling campfire tales, and his sensibility can still be discerned in its kind sort of fantasy and concern with outsiders.

The Almodovar who made his name as an all-out provocateur in the Eighties considers that wild art’s becalmed far side, in this quietly wonderful meditation on where it’s left him. Antonio Banderas leads familiar faces from throughout his career with an atypically quiet, Cannes prize-winning performance as Salvador Mallo, a world-famous, gay Spanish director who’s seemingly washed up.

If you’re looking for escapism from anxieties about Brexit, the worldwide refugee crisis and rising authoritarianism, Christian Petzold’s Transit is not going to provide comfort. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1944 novel about a Jewish writer fleeing incarceration in Germany and trying to get passage to Mexico, this is a wholly original take on the Holocaust genre.

Quentin Tarantino’s made a big deal of this being his nin^th film, while heralding his retirement after number 10 with the sort of nostalgic fandom he’s always ladled over his favourite directors and stars. Such self-consciousness (if not self-aggrandisement) is risky, because you’ve really got to deliver. 

Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of everyday life.