James McAvoy’s directing debut has a plot that’s so implausible, it would probably be laughed out of pitch meetings. But the story is essentially true, as recounted in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “Based on a true lie”, the opening credits announce.

David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. 

François Ozon’s film of Albert Camus's The Stranger, one o

It’s hard to describe this hot mess of a film without divulging the entire plot. And even if you did, you’d struggle to convey the scabrous psychosexual atmosphere, or summarise the thematic currents that swirl beneath the surface. As director Peter Medak says in one of the interviews on this typically well-stocked BFI disc, “It's too complicated to explain."

Immaturity is a virtue in Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy, a slapstick class satire set in an exclusive New York apartment block where being on the list gains a hellish new meaning. Derivative, fright-free and frenetically stylised, it still partially confirms the promise of the director’s 2018 debut Why Don’t You Just Die!

The vertigo of lawlessness in Stalin’s Russia carries contemporary resonance in Sergei Loznitsa’s latest Soviet parable. As a Russian dictator invades a neighbour and erases his enemies and the US Supreme Court presides over an authoritarian rampage, paranoid purges and show trials no longer seem distant.

“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018).

The Hail Mary pass is a desperate act of sporting faith when regular tactics fail, and the world’s end is faced here by constitutional optimists on both sides of the camera: The Martian novelist Andy Weir and its film’s writer Drew Goddard, Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord and Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, waking alone in a spaceship unreachable light years from home, beard and brain mangled

Tony Kiritsis (the excellent Bill Skarsgård; Nosferatu) is a nervy, paranoid oddball. Well, he would be. He has an appointment with a mortgage broker and in the long cardboard box that he’s carrying is a sawn-off shotgun.

Do we really care what Hitler liked to eat? Well, here’s a film that does, so I can reveal an answer. Typical meals might have included chick pea salad with marinated courgette, pea soup with mint, or “cabbage fantasy” with cheese béchamel, followed by “his beloved apricot cake”. Of course, as every quiz expert knows, the Führer – along with having one testicle – became at some point a committed vegetarian.