It’s unbelievable how hard it is to retell the greatest story ever told. And yet dramatists still feel the urge. The BBC had a big Easter binge a few years ago with the Ulster actor James Nesbitt playing a sort of Prodius Pilate. Now here’s a film financed by producers of a missionary bent. It’s called Risen and it’s essentially a sermon disguised as a sword-and-sandals epic.

Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) feels he’s “living in a future that had already taken place”. Director Ben Wheatley, too, has made a late-arriving Seventies exploitation pic from JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. High-Rise is a highly sexy and violent look through a distorting lens at both that familiar past, and the way we live now.

You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.

"Girls just wanna have fun," or so we're told in the exuberant signature song from Cyndi Lauper making a surprise appearance midway through Anomalisa. But try telling that to the sad-eyed folk who move through Charlie Kaufman's dazzlingly sorrowful 2016 Oscar nominee, as if in a sort of hushed-voiced haze.

Home can be the most horrifying place, especially when you’re pregnant. Kate (Clemence Poesy) isn’t even sure she wants the kid that’s on the way to disrupt life with fellow arty professional Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore). That is, until a couple move in below their Islington flat, and she’s befriended by Theresa (Laura Birn), an exotically glamorous Finn evangelical about her own pregnancy, who Kate finds herself fascinated by.

Perhaps if you are in a sufficiently patient state, this slowburn of a Swedish art house film will suit your mood, but if fast cutting and rapid crossfire dialogue is your thing, it may be best to steer clear of The Here After. The debut feature of writer-director Magnus van Horn has done well at overseas film festivals, but may be a harder sell as a night out in a UK cinema on a chilly March evening.  

In case anyone hasn’t guessed from the flauntingly obvious title, Fifty Shades of Black is a parody of 2012’s favourite piece of trash lit: EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which was adapted for film by director Sam Taylor-Johnson in time to underwhelm audiences on Valentine’s Day 2015.

As a title, Hail, Caesar! is as delightfully self-conscious and “inside Hollywood” as The Hudsucker Proxy and O, Brother Where Are Thou? An alternative might have been It’s a Wonderful Lie.

Richard Gere is a quiet knockout in Time Out of Mind, the Oren Moverman film that has for some reason remained as below the radar as its invisible (to the rest of society anyway) central character. Why wasn't this performance in the Oscar mix for the seasonal gongs just gone? He'd have had my vote, that's for sure, though it's doubtless part of its Israeli-American writer-director's game plan that this star turn remain unshowy and self-effacing in keeping with the sorrowful terrain that it traverses with unforced ease.

The get-the-President movie, a genre we might term "POTUS in Peril", has had a chequered history, from The President's Plane Is Missing, Air Force One and Escape from New York to White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Now here's London Has Fallen, which is the sequel to the last of these, but adds almost nothing in the way of innovation or inspiration.