Emerald Fennell’s latest film begins with a sly joke. As the production company credits roll, the sound of distinctive creaking overlays them, increasing in frequency and intensity, and joined by male groans that reach a climax. She's at it again, we are being led to think, the gratuitous graphic sex.

Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.

It’s a story being repeated the world over – apex predators such as lynx, wolves and bears hunted to extinction, followed by the gradual realisation that a healthy ecosystem requires their presence.

Attempts to reintroduce them have met with varying degrees of success. In Yellowstone National Park, the grey wolves released 20 years ago have proved hugely beneficial, but whenever livestock are in the picture things get messy.

Fabled for (among other things) The Evil Dead, Darkman and Spider-Man, Sam Raimi made his last appearance as a director on 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was one of the biggest hits of his career. Designed on a slightly smaller scale, Send Help may not overtake it commercially, but it mixes horror and black comedy with a castaway-survival theme to devastatingly entertaining effect.

When news first filtered through that the Scouse comedian John Bishop’s marital woes were going to be turned into a film, my brain lazily filed its director’s name under the wrong Bradley: Whitford, not Cooper. Having seen Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, I almost wish my brain had got it right first time.

The latest brainwave of director Richard Linklater is wonderfully simple: don’t do another remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film, A bout de souffle (1959), make a movie about the making of the film that nails what the movement he helped launch, the nouvelle vague, stood for. And make it with a French cast and crew.

The typical Jason Statham character is a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, maybe as a hitman, a safe-cracker or a former member of some special forces unit.

Kangaroo has promising ingredients: a Sydney TV weather reporter accustomed to soft city life is forced to reconsider his priorities (what, no sparkling Icelandic water or spa treatments?) when stranded in the Outback.

This is a tasteful but somewhat unmoving adaptation of writer Helen MacDonald’s memoir, which in 2014 won the Samuel Johnson and Costa book prizes. MacDonald was an academic lecturing in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, when their father, Alisdair MacDonald the press photographer, died suddenly.  

Lionel (Paul Mescal; played as a child by Leo Cocovinis) has perfect pitch and is able to name the note his mother coughs each morning. He can harmonise with the barking of the dog across the field. “Early on I thought everyone could see sound.” Sounds bring shapes, colours, tastes too: “B minor and my mouth turned bitter.”