Ben Wheatley’s sixth film in a prolific, unpredictable career is a shoot-‘em-up in the most literal sense. Setting a superb international cast led by Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy down in a big, grim warehouse, he lets them blast bits off each other for 70 of Free Fire’s 90 minutes. After Wheatley’s most obviously ambitious film, his J.G.

A decade ago Romanian director Cristian Mungiu took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a gruelling abortion drama set in the dying days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The cold intensity of that film made it a key work in the remarkable movement that came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, which directed a pitiless eye at the reality of the country as it struggled to throw off the burden of decades of Communism.    

Back at Cannes last year with his new film Graduation (Bacalaureat), Mungiu won the Best Director award. Graduation is set in the present day – even if not much has changed in the bleakly monotone world Mungiu depicts, mobile phones excepted – and allows us to guess at the director’s verdict on the intervening period. It’s a far from optimistic prognosis: his experience has made him sad.

To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy

At least that is the impression we receive from the hero of his film. Romeo Altea (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged hospital physician, tired beyond his years, brought down by the everyday business of living. He is in a relationship with a younger woman but struggles to end his unhappy marriage to wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), who looks like a catatonic wraith (Adrian Titieni with Lia Bugnar, pictured below). The only beacon of hope – clearly one Romeo has been tending for years – is their daughter Eliza (Maria Drăguş).

She is the apple of the family eye, and her father is almost over-protective of her. Now on the cusp of independence, Eliza has won a scholarship to study in the UK (Cambridge, no less), which will realise her parents’ dreams about her finding a place in a better world, and leaving the dour reality of her homeland behind forever.

All that remains is for her to get the necessary grades at her school exams, which should be a formality. But cruel circumstance – I’m not sure if in Mungiu’s world that’s exactly the same thing as “fate” – intervenes. The day before, she’s attacked outside school and narrowly avoids being raped. Badly shaken, her right arm in plaster, her future suddenly looks less assured: the shock may cause her to fail the tests. Her father is distraught – he didn’t drop her off in the usual place, and in some way feels partly responsible – and will resort to anything to assure his daughter’s future.That means resorting to all the ruses of corruption offered by the world in which he lives; given his position as a doctor, they are plentiful. He’s close friends anyway with the police inspector investigating the case, which offers a natural referral to the deputy mayor – he’s in urgent need of an operation – who in turn is owed a favour by the school’s headmaster (so persuading the examiners shouldn't be a problem).

But Altea faces an inexorable choice. By going down that route, relying on such connections (and involving his daughter in the process), he’s negating all the values he has instilled in Eliza. There’s double cruelty in the fact that there is no other way out: the scholarship just can’t be held over, regardless of what has happened. And double irony given that such string-pulling was the natural way in the old, communist order, when you battled the system – it was how the doctor himself escaped military service in his youth, we learn. Now, even without any money changing hands, it’s the kind of corruption that the regime has set out to eradicate (recent street protests in Romania remind us how real such concerns are there). As the immediate ramifications of Eliza’s exams gain wider prominence, even the anti-corruption investigators admit to Altea that he isn’t really their target (they are the first to admit that as a doctor he doesn’t take bribes, or “incentives” as they are referred to at one point).It’s a deeply forlorn canvas, as if Mungiu, a generation after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, confirms that his protagonists just can’t escape the rites and habits of the world that formed them. It achieves extra poignancy when Romeo and Magda remember how they returned home – we presume, from abroad – in 1991, the year in which Romania received its new constitution, with a conviction that they could contribute to building a new way of life in their homeland (“we thought we’d move mountains”).

That idealism may have long disappeared, but at least their conviction that something different was available to Eliza elsewhere remained (even if their faith in Britain as such an ideal world seems a tad naïve). That disillusionment, somehow intricately connected to middle age, is compounded by Romeo’s shattering, yet somehow unacknowledged sadness that he must leave his marriage behind. His wife knows all about Sandra (Malina Manovici), the younger woman with whom he has found some new happiness, but has herself chosen to postpone any resolution of that question until after their daughter’s departure.

To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy. Graduation is his first film with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru, but the muted colours look familiar, as are the depressing exteriors of a world that is somehow untended (the film’s opening shot shows a dug-up street: we wonder whether Mungiu is preparing to delve deeper into his world, or has already dug its grave). The director adheres to his past credo of using music only when it is actually playing on radio or CD, his chosen register the luminous melancholy of the countertenor repertoire, devastatingly expressive when we encounter it in Handel’s “Ombra mai fù” or Purcell’s “Cold Song” (a Mungiu title, if ever there was one).

And yet… Eliza may yet confound her parents’ expectations (and fears). The final graduation photograph shows a bunch of young people not so different from any other (pictured, above: Eliza, below centre): the director even allows a popular Romanian song to accompany his closing titles. The playing throughout is superb, which speaks for so much in itself: Graduation has a paradoxical poise in its execution that just can’t be entirely groundless. If Mungiu’s tool, like that of his medical hero, is a scalpel, hope remains that the operation may not prove in vain. But what a gruelling journey.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Graduation

The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25^th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies.

Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.

Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco – who refuses to be evicted from the apartment in which she has spent her life, the parallels with the presidency were striking. While it brought the film extra attention the situation didn’t play exclusively to its advantage. First it received an unjustified 18 certificate (later adjusted), then it was controversially overlooked for Brazil’s Best Foreign Film Oscar entry.

'Aquarius' certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom 

Filho is certainly a director alert to politics, at least with a small “p”. His debut feature Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 was an elliptical picture of his homeland through the microcosm of a small urban environment. It depicted contemporary Brazil as carrying considerable historical baggage, caught between tradition and modernity: one dividing line was drawn around real estate – low-rise, old style versus high-rise, new style.

That distinction is at the heart of Aquarius, but there’s nothing abstract in the way it’s portrayed. Its heroine, played with wonderful aplomb by Brazilian star Sonia Braga, has spent her life, at least as far back as the 1980 flashback with which the film begins, in a spacious apartment in a three-storey building – its name gives the film its title – overlooking the beach. Its interior is packed with the accumulations of a life richly lived – now 65, Clara was a music critic, whose broad tastes range from Brazil’s great native composer Heiror Villa-Lobos to Queen (her vinyl collection is enormous).

That opening episode shows the younger Clara (played by Barbara Colen) as a free spirit, driving her car on the beach, music playing loud; she is gamine, her hair cropped close, as opposed to the flowing tresses that are so much part of her later personality (the film is divided into three loose parts, this opener titled “Clara’s hair”). The main business of the episode, though, is a celebration party for her much-loved Aunt Lucia, another independent soul whose life spans back into earlier eras of Brazil’s history, who never married, and spent time in prison (a clear political allusion).

Aquarius certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom, and the camera relishes a chest of drawers, as Filho fills in its particular history with flashbacks to Lucia’s own youthful sexual passion. It highlights the sense that life is an accretion of such memories, such precious objects. Thus, the associations of Clara's building are incomparably richer than the skyscraper that would be put up in its place.

Clara's husband and three children are at the centre of that celebration, and through them we learn that she has successfully battled cancer (her mastectomy features later). By the next part, she is widowed, her children grown up and living their own lives, with attitudes that do not always accord with those of their mother. .

Filho weaves a rich tapestry with his feisty, forthright heroine in centre place, surrounded by a host of other characters. There’s her long-serving housekeeper Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto, prompting reflection on the divides, class-based and racial, that characterise Brazilian society); her wider family (pictured top), including a favourite nephew; the newspaper connections from her earlier career that will assist at a crucial moment; even the lifeguard on the beach who supervises her morning swim, with whom Clara has a long and affectionate friendship, and whose help will also prove useful (beach scene, pictured above). Above all there is the company of a wider group of women friends, with whom she congregates at a dance evening early on in the film; it’s a lovely, laughing, gossipy atmosphere which reveals, among other things, that this is a generation for whom sexuality remains very much a thing of the present.

At close on two and a half hours, 'Aquarius' is a languid film

Filho portrays it as an organic world whose natural habits and routines are threatened by the prospect of its physical locus, the Aquarius building, being destroyed. The director makes the lead player in the company trying to redevelop it the grandson of its original proprietor, adding another generational element to the story; we sense that if the older man somehow fitted into the accepted order, the younger one, slick with the new confidence of a US Business Studies degree, plays by new rules. The variety of methods to which he resorts is inventive, their impact most unsettling for the way that they reverberate uneasily in Clara’s dreams. The ending is left open, with Clara’s cancer – those two words are the title of the film's closing episode – assuming a somehow symbolic quality. If cancer destroys the body from within, Filho makes explicit parallels to the destruction of Clara’s building, but also refers to her wider society (in Brazilian terms, by the almost insuperable entity that is capitalism and politics combined).

At close on two and a half hours, Aquarius is a languid film, lovingly enjoying its length, and blessed with a simply glorious performance from Braga. Physically she stands out, high cheekbones, a balletically slim form, and the hair, either falling loose or tied tightly over her head. It’s combined with such keenness of intelligence, such a sense of strength intermingled with vulnerability, such depth of character. Estupenda!

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Aquarius

In space, no-one can hear you say “hang on, haven’t I seen this before?” The sprawling, labyrinthine space ship full of ducts and passageways for terrifying creatures to hide in, the laid-back crew who’ve become a little too blasé about life in space, the cute little outer-space organism that looks like an exotic novelty pet…

Percy Fawcett: does the name ring a bell? He ought by rights to sit in the pantheon of boys’ own explorers alongside Cook and Ross, Parry and Franklin, Livingstone and Mungo Park, Scott and Shackleton. Either side of the Great War, he returned again and again to the impenetrable South American interior, in pursuit of an ancient Amazonian civilisation which he called Z.

"Attention must be paid," we are famously told near the close of Death of a Salesman. And so it was this year on Oscar night when Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (A Separation was the first), this time for a movie that leans heavily on Arthur Miller's classic – though whether as crutch or inspiration will remain for individual viewers

What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more.