An alternate reality where everyone has hotdogs for fingers? A climatic scene that references the Pixar movie Ratatouille? Never before has a film been quite so daft and quite so profound, all at the same time. Ms Michelle Yeoh puts her martial arts movie background to unexpectedly good use as Evelyn Wang, a disillusioned and quietly desperate laundrette owner who is plunged into a multi-universal reality during a tax audit. In this way, the film combines its intergalactically wacky visuals, with concerns that remain recognisable human.

It should come as no surprise to learn that Boiling Point’s writer and director Mr Philip Barantini is a former chef. Like all the best dishes, this low-budget British drama makes use of just a handful of high-quality ingredients. There’s actor Mr Stephen Graham at his tightly wound best, there’s the real east London restaurant location, and then there’s the “one-shot” device. This is a single, unedited take which follows Graham’s chef character in real time, from the start of one of the most difficult evenings of his career, right to its bitter end.

There have been sharper class satires, but this Palme d’Or winner from Mr Ruben Östlund dives into the choppy waters of its subject with such gleeful abandon that it’s nigh on impossible to resist. Mr Harris Dickinson and Ms Charlbi Dean star as an Insta-influencer couple who find themselves aboard a luxury cruise on a superyacht. There, they rub shoulders with aristocratic arms dealers, a lonely tech billionaire and a suicidal sea captain. It’s a turbulent crossing, and that’s before the literal sea storm hits.

As a made-to-order, Jaws-influenced, summer blockbuster, Nope hits all the right notes: visual spectacle, slow-build dread and, in Mr Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ and Ms Keke Palmer’s Emerald, a brother-sister duo worth rooting for. But since this is also a Mr Jordan Peele joint, there’s plenty more besides. Peele, the mastermind and creative mentor behind such layered social thrillers as Get Out (2017), Candyman (2021) and HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), always gives us something to think about. His take on the alien invasion thriller is no exception.

The Oscar-winning Irish writer and director Mr Martin McDonagh is back on home turf and it shows, in this doleful and deft black comedy. Deep thinker Colm (Mr Brendan Gleeson) abruptly severs his long companionship with happy-go-lucky Pádraic (Mr Colin Farrell) by deciding he’s no longer content to wile away afternoons in the pub. With an eye on his immortal legacy, Colm would rather compose songs on his fiddle – much to Pádraic’s heartbreak. The reunion of these In Bruges stars is as delightful as expected, but Mr Barry Keoghan as supposed dunce Dominic, just about steals the movie out from under them.

Around the same time Colm and Pádraic’s friendship was fizzling out in Ireland, 8,000 miles away in India, another bromance bond was forming. Or, at least, it was in the imaginings of director Mr SS Rajamouli, box-office king and India’s answer to Mr Steven Spielberg. There’s no evidence the two revolutionary heroes Komaram (Mr NT Rama Rao Jr) and Alluri (Mr Ram Charan) ever really met, but RRR spins this notion into an all-action, song-and-dance extravaganza. If you’re bored of the same old Marvel output, then this is the superhero-scale viewing experience for you.

The premise from director Mr Oliver Hermanus is intriguing enough: what if the story of Ikiru, Mr Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic of world cinema was transposed to the starched shirts and repressed emotions of 1950s London? But Living boasts more besides. There’s a career-best performance from Mr Bill Nighy (if you still think of him as the ageing rock star from Love Actually, prepare to be astonished), and a script by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and seer of the human soul, Mr Kazuo Ishiguro. All in all, it’s life-changing stuff.

Ms Katia Krafft and Mr Maurice Krafft were two-of-a-kind and a total one-off; intrepid volcanologists, whose love story was consecrated in the churning lava of Mount Stromboli. Between that 1970 honeymoon trip and the Mount Unzen eruption that killed them some 20 years later, the Kraffts captured hundreds of hours of 16mm footage. Director Ms Sara Dosa combines this with Ms Miranda July’s narration to create a poetic mediation on the wonders of the natural world and love, the most powerful natural wonder of all.

Even before this 1970s Los Angeles-set comedy-drama, Mr Paul Thomas Anderson had a snug spot in the hearts of many a film fan. But with Licorice Pizza, the filmmaker behind Magnolia, Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread really made a connection. Both Mr Cooper Hoffman (son of Thomas Anderson’s late collaborator, Mr Philip Seymour Hoffman) and pop-rock star Ms Alana Haim are improbably charming in their screen debuts, and while the film’s release instigated a thousand internet controversies, when you’re watching Gary and Alana running through the streets to the strains of Wings’ “Let Me Roll It”, none of that seems to matter.