Two young boys play by the water. Soon, one is dead. This enigmatic tragedy is the core of a four-decade Chinese saga of grief, guilt and love, at once intimately personal and scarred by the state’s grinding turns.

Blue periods can lead to golden streaks. Such is almost the case with Honey Boy, which Shia LaBeouf wrote during a court-ordered stay in a rehab clinic for the treatment of PTSD symptoms. Based on LaBeouf’s upbringing and childhood acting years, the film focuses on the troubled relationship between Otis (Noah Jupe) and his dad James (Shia LaBeouf), switching occasionally to a young adult Otis (Lucas Hedges) undergoing rehabilitation.

Amidst the deluge of high-profile year-end releases, it would be a shame if the collective Oscar-bait noise drowned out Ordinary Love, as quietly extraordinary a film as has been seen in some time. Telling of a couple whose marriage is impacted by a cancer diagnosis, this collaboration between the husband-and-wife team of Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa offers a performance for the ages from Lesley Manville, whose career ascendancy in middle age remains a wonder to behold.

Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago.

Writer-director Jennifer Kent knows that Australia’s colonial past shouldn’t be beautified, and she drives that fact home in every gloom-drenched shot of The Nightingale (her second feature after The Babadook from 2014). This is an immensely ambitious film and an unrelenting long haul of suffering that confronts themes of sexual violence and Indigenous dispossession.

For an actor, there are few bigger risks than writing and directing your own film. Securing funding is pretty easy if you’re a household name, like Karen Gillan is, but that doesn’t mean your script is any good or your vision holds water. At their worst, these films can be vain and embarrassing affairs. At their best, you’re left wondering if there’s anything their star can’t do. The Party’s Just Beginning puts Gillan very firmly in the latter camp.

“Badass” – as applied to dynamic women – and “girl power” may be the kinds of exhausted clichés that are reductive in the #MeToo and Time’s Up era, but the new Charlie’s Angels movie revitalises the attitude they describe in a way that’s neither condescending nor retrogressive.

The world’s most successful mystery writer is found dead on the morning after his 85^th birthday. In attendance in his Gothic pile are his bickering family, each of whom might wish him dead, and a colourful detective ready to determine whodunnit.  

A documentary about celebration, fellowship, and the comforting afterglow of cherished memories. What better way to spend a cold late-Autumn evening? Such is the effect of this charming, low-key investigation into the story of Scotch.

A defining chapter in American history is all but sold down river in Harriet, director Kasi Lemmons' tubthumpingly banal film about the extraordinary bravery and courage of the American freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman. Telling the same story more expansively chronicled several decades ago in a Cicely Tyson-led American mini-series, Harriet casts the diminutive yet mighty English actress Cynthia Erivo in the title role without seeming to know quite how to use her.