It’s a dog’s life, this lockdown; if only I could meet my friends whenever I want to and roam around freely without obeying these annoying restrictions! 

It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.

This heartfelt documentary follows twin girls who are just starting primary school. We first meet Amber struggling to pop her head through her shirt, helped by her sister Olivia.

“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for several Academy Awards.

There’s something of an anomaly in Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s debut feature between its fast-moving dramatic opening, defined by an agile hand-held camera, and the much slower, more static scenes that follow.

Like the sun-happy LA of this film’s setting, there’s a hard-to-pinpoint sham quality to Wander Darkly. It feels like too much phoney dialogue crept in to the final script of this “serious” film by writer-director Tara Miele.

There aren't many unforgettable moments in The Columnist, but one occurs when the eponymous Dutch journalist Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) clambers from the skylight of her house and, unseen by her middle-aged neighbour (Rein Hofman), who's doing DIY on his roof, tips him to his death on his patio. It's the offhandedness of the murder that's impressive – it recalls the young thug blithely tipping the bound woman into a lake in both versions of Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997/2007). 

Cassandra and her sister – or perhaps they’re friends or lovers – seem extraordinarily in tune. Like choreographed dancers, they move precisely in unison, down to tripping over their scarves at the same moment or flopping drunkenly into bed together while a cell phone buzzes beside them unanswered, on and on into the night.

Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. 

There was always something a little diffident about teenage Marion Elliott-Said, who created her on-stage persona Poly Styrene after putting together her band X-Ray Spex from a small ad in the back pages of the NME in 1977.