Lee Marshall

The Wave is nothing if not ambitious, and in its bittersweet ending it reaches a melancholic, nuanced understanding that once the feminist wave broke, the backlash began. But the kind of complex debates about consent, vigilante justice and empowerment that are deployed here sit uneasily in what is in some ways a classical female self-realisation musical.

Ben’Imana is a film that works by accretion, layering its stories, characters and themes like the colourful textiles seen in robes, scarves, curtains, bedcovers, school uniforms, or, in one devastating scene, the torn clothes of massacred children, unearthed in a garden.

Everything is in flux in The Dreamed Adventure, even the genre of a film that shape-shifts between noir, western and romance. At its heart is the director’s extraordinary deployment of a cast of non-professionals who seem to carry their own stories with them in every line and gesture.

Full Phil is a work of art masquerading as a B-movie, a film of depth and strange fascination – one that ends in a moment of body horror that turns strangely tender. It’s difficult to think of many other contemporary cineastes who could pull that off.

Smoothly executed throughout, Avedon displays some snappy editing allowing for flow. It may be couched in admiring tones but it is persuasive in arguing why the photographer mattered, and why he seemed most at home and in control from behind a camera lens.

More effective as an earnest, cumulative emotional journey than as a viewing experience made up of rather random parts, La Bola Negra does eventually repay some of the batter

Its cold precision thaws in a way that is uncharacteristic for Mungiu, leaving us with a thought-provoking drama about conflicting values that feels, in the end, a little bloodless and underpowered.

There’s plenty of food for thought here, but the script’s penchant for saccharine touches – one aided and abetted by a lilting string-led soundtrack that turns to treacle a little too often – undercuts the authority of the film’s philosophical musings.

Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

What it does feel is a little cerebral, rather wary of engaging too deeply with its characters. The effect is both alienating and refreshing.