Girl review – trans teenager dreams of a dancer’s life

Victor Polster is outstanding as a trans 15-year-old auditioning for ballet school in Lukas Dhont’s intense, emotional drama

‘I have the right to tell this story’: Lukas Dhont defends his trans film Girl

His film about a transitioning dancer was set for the big time – until it was called ‘the most dangerous movie about a trans character in years’. Does the director have any regrets?

Ninety and out to shock: meet the first ever Oscar nominated female director

The Italian film-maker Lina Wertmüller broke ground when she was Oscar nominated for Seven Beauties, but her films were never calculated to win mainstream appeal

Border review – into the woods for a body-horror romance

Ali Abbasi’s dark drama focuses on transgression and taboo as two troubled people living on the edge of society develop a strange friendship

Border: a Nordic noir romance with cinema’s weirdest sex scene

Sweden-based Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s new film features quasi-Neanderthal misfits making love in the woods and asks what it is to be human

Hannah review – quietly haunting portrait of an upturned life

In this often wordless drama, Charlotte Rampling brings an intelligent intensity to the role of a woman whose ageing husband has been jailed

Sauvage review – on the street with a homeless hustler

Camille Vidal-Naquet kicks off a candid account of the savage realities facing a young sex worker with a startling twist

Foxtrot review – desert heat sears a family in crisis

Samuel Maoz brings a weird but exhilarating style to the mysterious story of an Israeli soldier and his anxious parents

Top 20 J-horror films – ranked!

Japanese horror has always set the bar high when it comes to making your skin crawl. But which make even the hardened gorehounds wince?

Capernaum review – little boy lost in an unjust world

In Nadine Labaki’s powerful drama, a Beirut child sues his parents for giving birth to him – before ending up on the street caring for a stranger’s baby

Elisa y Marcela review – same-sex marriage drained of passion

Isabel Coixet transforms the real-life story of two Spanish women who married in 1901 into a bafflingly joyless affair

Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno review – endless summer of sunshine and sex

Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour epic seductively depicts the hedonistic antics of a twentysomething crowd

I Was at Home, But review – breakdown on the verge of coherence

The anger of this opaque film’s heroine, faced with a runaway son and a broken bicycle, is not explained by its disconnected scenes and incongruous donkeys