Love Lies Bleeding

From May 3

Swapping the psychological realism of Saint Maud for an exercise in pure style, Love Lies Bleeding is the new film from promising British filmmaker Rose Glass. An 80s-set erotic thriller boasting an undeniably hot double-act in Kirsten Stewart and real-life bodybuilder Katy O’Brien, it’s the story of gym worker Lou (Stewart) and drifter Jackie (O’Brien), forced to go on the run when their affair calls down the wrath of local crimelord Lou Sr (Ed Harris), who also happens to be Lou’s dad. It’s thinly written at times, but Glass’s film is at least half about the thrill of seeing these two bodies come together on screen, and it’s winningly performed by O’Brien and loose cannon Stewart, who can’t so much as answer a phone normally these days. (We mean that as a compliment.)

La Chimera

From May 10

Alice Rohrwacher is one of the more fascinating Italian filmmaking talents to emerge in a while; her soulful odes to the Italian countryside of her youth alert to the possibilities of magic. Searching and poetic yet full of twinkling mischief, La Chimera might just be her best yet: it’s the story of disgraced archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor), rumpled of suit and half-mad with grief at the disappearance of his girlfriend, who calls on strange powers of divination to steal treasures from Etruscan tombs with a band of local graverobbers. Featuring fine performances from O’Connor, Isabella Rossellini as a grieving matriarch, and Carol Duarte as the film’s sneaky, beating heart, this is a cinematic treasure not to be slept on.

Read our interview with Josh O'Connor and Alice Rohrwacher here.

The Beast

From May 31

In Bertrand Bonello’s bizarre twist on an old Henry James novella, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) undergoes a DNA procedure that will purge her of past-life traumas and make her fit for work in a future controlled by AI. So begins a time-hopping, audaciously atonal mash-up of sci-fi, horror, period romance and home invasion tropes, as we learn that past-Gabrielle has a deep-seated fear of impending calamity, which in turn forges a centuries-spanning connection to Louis (George Mackay), an English gentleman abroad in 19th century Paris who later pops up as an incel ... Are you keeping up at the back? Philosophically dense and mad as a box of frogs, Bonello’s film is a romance of sorts, though it’s often at its best when divining a mood of pure fear keyed into the present.

Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry

From May 3

Tbilisi-born writer and director Elene Naveriani made their debut bow at Cannes last year with Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry, a surprising romantic drama with shades of Aki Kaurismaki’s bluff existentialism. After a brush with death while out walking in the country, taciturn Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) is seized by a sudden will to live that sees her seduce local deliveryman Murman (Temiko Chichinadze). “There you go,” she says to herself after a first encounter in the stockroom. “Your 48 years of virginity.” Thus begins an unexpected love affair that Etero keeps hidden from the local gossips that pass for her friends, one that’s filmed with a sharp eye for beauty by Naveriani and wonderfully performed by Cichinadze, whose fabulously expressive face seems lifted from German expressionist cinema.

Hoard

From May 17

Debuts don’t come more singular than Hoard, Luna Carmoon’s eccentric tale of buried family trauma told in loosely autobiographical strokes. The film boasts a brilliant performance from newcomer Saura Lightfoot Leon as foster-kid Maria, triggered by the arrival at home of an old tenant, Michael (Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn), with whom she shares a volatile connection.

Set in Carmoon’s dowdy south London of the 1990s, this is a film full of strange intuition clad in kitchen-sink clothing, presenting in Maria a character who experiences her trauma as a form of dangerous magic hiding in the everyday. In early scenes at home before she’s moved into care, our young protagonist – here played by Lily-Beau Leach – feels her first pangs of shame at her mum (Hayley Squires), whose compulsive hoarding is beginning to get her noticed at school. But Maria loves her mum dearly, and we start to see her through the child’s eyes as an almost witch-like figure, full of strange powers.

Skip forward to the 90s, and Maria is a happy, (mostly) well-adjusted teen living with foster-mum Michelle, prone to slouching about the house in football shorts and annoying her cousins, who tease her for her strangeness. But all that’s upended when Michael, another damaged soul who is engaged to be married, shows up at the house one day, opening the door just a crack to the madness that overtook her mum. Carmoon’s film is funny and disturbing and, if it goes off the rails slightly in an episodic last act, it’s a minor quibble in a work that marches to the beat of its own drum.

Read our interview with Luna Carmoon here.