CUSTODY (15, 94 mins)
Writer-director Xavier Legrand's feature debut is a continuation of his award-winning short Just Before Losing Everything about a terrified wife wriggling free of the suffocating grasp of her abusive husband.
Custody deservedly won two major prizes at the Venice Film Festival including Best Director and will send a chill down the spine of UK audiences with a penchant for heart-wrenching, naturalistic cinema.
Miriam (Lea Drucker) has managed to flee her volatile spouse Antoine (Denis Menochet) with their 12-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria).
The distraught lad becomes a pawn in a battle between the spouses when Antoine asserts his legal rights to see Julien.
The judge (Saadia Bentaieb) is compelled to assess the case purely on who she believes: brittle and emotional Miriam or charming Antoine.
Her verdict has devastating repercussions for Miriam, Julien, 18-year-old sister Josephine (Mathilde Auneveux) and the family, who are determined to protect Miriam and her boy from the monster that lurks behind Antoine's well-practised smile.
THE TITAN (15, 95 mins)
The year is 2048. Earth is horribly overpopulated and dwindling resources force scientists to look to the stars for mankind's survival.
Military officer Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington) and his wife Abigail (Taylor Schilling) leave Los Angeles in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear event to start anew at a Nato base.
In this carefully controlled environment, Professor Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson) is overseeing a top-secret government-funded programme to ready servicemen and women for a new life on Saturn's moon, Titan.
The moon's atmosphere is far different to Earth so Rick receives a series of injections that should allow him to breathe the nitrogen-heavy air.
In fact, the programme is designed to transform unwitting subjects into an alien-human hybrid christened Homo Titanians.
Rick undergoes shocking physical mutations and Abigail breaks into Professor Collingwood's laboratory to learn the shocking truth about her husband's grim fate.
WESTERN (12A, 121 mins)
In her acclaimed third feature, writer-director Valeska Grisebach explores tensions between two close-knit communities separated by the language barrier.
Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) is the foreman of a group of German construction workers, who have been sent to a remote Bulgarian village to build a hydroelectric plant that will have a positive impact for thousands of families.
The Germans set up camp on the outskirts of the village, where their animosity towards the locals threatens to boil over in the sweltering summer sun.
Only former soldier Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) shows any willingness to engage with the Bulgarians, an act of defiance and kindness which deepens divisions between the two tribes.
A fragile truce disintegrates when Vincent mistreats a Bulgarian woman called Vyara (Vyara Borisova), who likes to swim close to the German camp.
