A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition, but is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy

Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.

Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.

The 20-year failed romance between a singer and a dodgy music promoter becomes the vehicle for director Jia Zhangke’s latest exploration of China’s momentous recent history

As so often in the past, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke swims down into an ocean of sadness and strangeness; his new film is a mysterious quest narrative with a dynamic, westernised musical score. It tells a human story of a failed romance spanning 20 years, and brings this into parallel with a larger panorama: the awe-inspiring scale of millennial change that has transformed China in the same period, a futurist fervour for quasi-capitalist innovation that has turned out to co-exist with some very old-fashioned state coercion.

Caught by the Tides reflects with a kind of numb astonishment at all the novelties that the country has been required to welcome, all the vast upheavals for which the people have had to make sacrifices. The film shows us the mobster-businessmen who have done well in modern China, the patriotic ecstasy of Beijing getting picked to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the creation of the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam which meant so much unacknowledged pain for the displaced communities. (This latter was the subject of Jia’s Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life in 2006.) And finally of course there is the misery of the Covid lockdown.

Saura Lightfoot-Leon stars as a traumatised, rubbish-fixated teen in British director Luna Carmoon’s admirable, if hard-going debut

There are certain films – Michael Haneke’s original version of Funny Games is one, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe another – that I acknowledge as singular, visionary works of art, but which I never, ever want to watch again. Hoard, Luna Carmoon’s profoundly uncomfortable directorial debut, fits this category. It isn’t harrowing in the same way as the other works mentioned. But Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

Saura Lightfoot-Leon is magnetic as Maria, a teenager who has lived with a foster mother in south London for the past decade. Her birth mother (Hayley Squires), a compulsive hoarder who channelled her fierce love for her daughter into offerings of scavenged foil balls and chalk, was crushed by a falling pile of rubbish when Maria was eight. The memories had been neatly tidied away, but when she encounters former foster kid Michael (Joseph Quinn), older by 10 years but odd in the same abrasive, unsettling way that she is, Maria starts to delve into the detritus of her past. In practice, this means that she stops washing, starts collecting humming bags of rubbish and enters into a teasing semi-sexual game with Michael (shades of the malicious playfulness of Yann Samuell’s Love Me If You Dare). It’s impressive, up to a point, but having taken the character to the brink of breakdown, the film doesn’t know what to do next. The ending is rather too clean for a story about mess.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

The weather didn’t play ball, but Magnus von Horn’s fierce fairytale and Andrea Arnold’s kitchen-sink take on English mysticism should count among the first-week highlights for Greta Gerwig’s jury

The Cannes film festival opens just as the heavens do, too. It’s raining on the red carpet and on the black limousines and on the immaculate white pavilions that line up on the beach. The rain falls on the A-listers as they climb the stairs to the Palais, and on the stoic huddled masses who gather behind the police cordons. Everybody’s bedraggled and windswept; it feels as though the whole town’s been at sea. “My main wish is that we see some great films this year,” says Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president, casting an anxious eye at the sky. “But also I’m wishing for a little sunshine as well.”

If it’s raining in Cannes, it means there’s a glitch in the script. It’s one of the event’s in-built paradoxes that a festival which predominantly plays out in darkened rooms should be so dependent on good weather; so in thrall to its complementary circus of photocalls, yacht parties and open-air film screenings. All it takes is a downpour to trigger a disturbance in the force, a creeping sense of existential dread. The punters came expecting Technicolor. But the scene is all wrong: the world has gone monochrome.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

Cannes film festival
Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons

Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.

An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.