It has become increasingly rare for big, original ideas to be married with big, blockbuster budgets. The Creator is one of the few exceptions to the rule. After a seven-year absence from the big screen, Gareth Edwards – the director of Monsters, Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – is back to serve up a fresh sci-fi epic, one that has just as much action and thrills as it does smarts. 

Christian Mungiu is the leading light of the Romanian New Wave, an auteur in the truest sense of the term, a towering filmmaker with a consistent world view relayed through stunning cinematic style. 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, the story of two university roommates who try to procure an illegal abortion in the final days of Ceaușescu’s Romania, won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d’Or.

Somehow, autumn and a cosy mystery just belong together. Right on schedule, this September director and star Kenneth Branagh brings us his third outing as Hercule Poirot, A Haunting in Venice, following Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile.

Enjoying rave reviews and deafening buzz from both the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, Ira Sachs’ Passages is a fresh, dynamic take on contemporary relationship travails that marks a change of tack for the US indie darling. For Sachs’ trademark gentle humanism and bruised optimism – see Love Is Strange and Little Men – has been usurped here by something much more caustic and candid.

It's a cliche of British Cinema: Any low budget film set on a council estate must be a gruelling, miserabilist ordeal.  So, it’s such a joy to discover Scrapper, a heart-warming comedy, bubbling with hope, which delights in rebelling against that unwritten rule.

In celebration of the upcoming release of Charlotte Regan's Scrapper on 25 August, this season is dedicated to revisiting the debut films of some of the UK's most promising female directors, whose distinct voices and soaring career trajectories have brought them each felicitous acclaim.

Blue Beetle – the latest DC character to make the leap from the comic book pages to the Silver Screen – takes the origin story of a hero gaining new powers and gives it a fresh, armoured sheen. 

Since the rollicking success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Disney has searched for cinematic tales inspired by its own theme park rides that can deliver the same level of thrills as their real-life counterparts. Following on from The Country Bears, Tomorrowland and Jungle Cruise, Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion is set to recreate the heady highs of another classic Disney ride – this time with the emphasis on spooky spectacle. 

From acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Winocour – whom you may recognise from 2019’s Proxima, starring Eva Green and Matt Dillon – comes a piercing new drama that’s very close to her heart.