Only the River Flows

From August 16

Wei Shujun’s inky and unsettling noir moves like the river of its title: slow-moving on the surface, with dark swirling currents underneath that pull you deeper into its mysteries.

Adapted from Yu Hua’s novella Mistakes by the River, the story unfolds in a rural corner of China in 1995, as an old lady is found dead by the banks of a river. Detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) leads the murder investigation only for a suspect, a local ‘madman’ who was living with the lady, to turn up with all the evidence required to secure a conviction. Convenient? Ma certainly thinks so, obsessively pursuing the case till he begins to unravel, the truth an ever-receding spectre on the horizon.

Wei, a favourite at Cannes for his playful, metatextual style, signals his intent from the opening scene: a young boy dressed as a policeman patrolling the corridors of an abandoned building. Attempting to ambush his friends, he opens a door which gives out on to the street below – a lead that goes nowhere, and a foreshadowing of the existential black hole the case opens up in its protagonist’s life.

Ma and his team inhabit a twilit world drained of all colour, a grungy, smoke-filled dreamscape evocatively lensed by DOP Chengma. (All the characters smoke like it’s going out of fashion.) Abetted by a transfixing score from Howard Shore recalling his work on Crash, it’s a haunting and surreal slide into madness to file alongside resonant mysteries like Memories of Murder and Zodiac.

Kneecap

From August 23

The role of language as a form of resistance is the subject of Kneecap, Rich Peppiatt’s inspired film about the rise of Northern Ireland’s premier hip-hop crew.

The story is an unlikely one: Liam and Naoise, drug-dealing teens from West Belfast with a nose for trouble team up with teacher JJ when the latter meets Liam while working as a translator for the police. (The real members of the group play semi-fictionalised versions of themselves in the film.) Naoise’s father (Michael Fassbender, a nifty cameo) is an IRA man wanted by the law; JJ teaches Irish and is fed up with the language being treated as a relic of the past; impressed by the verbal pyrotechnics displayed in Liam’s diary, he encourages them to start an Irish-language group and dons a balaclava onstage as their DJ, Próvaí. And that’s where their problems begin, their presence stirring up old prejudice as they find themselves banned from the radio and investigated by the local chief of police (“I feel like I’ve discovered the Beatles, if the Beatles were shit.”)

Peppiatt, a former tabloid journalist, brings pace and roughneck swagger to the direction – at times it’s like watching early Danny Boyle – but the band are the real stars of the show here, especially the mysterious DJ Próvaí’s priceless turn as a man torn between respectability and righteous expression.

Dìdi

From August 2

Sean Wang’s Sundance Jury prize-winner Dìdi tells the story of Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American kid whose attempts to fit in with his peers put him increasingly at odds with his family. Chris’s mum (Twin Peaks’ Joan Chen), in particular, seems to have become the focus of some unspoken resentment, a friction that Wang puts at the heart of this tender, autobiographical drama, which has fun with its 00s setting (Superbad! Paramore! Myspace top friends lists!) and arrives on the back of a stellar run of American films exploring aspects of the Asian migrant experience (Minari, Past Lives, The Farewell).

Sky Peals

From August 9

The Costa coffees. The mindless trilling of slot machines. The dogged and inexplicable commitment to WHSmith, a brand that seemed on its way out in 1997. Is there a location on Earth that embodies the shopworn psyche of the UK in 2024 better than the motorway service station? Moin Hussain’s debut makes striking use of its setting as a kind of haunted limbo inhabited by its protagonist, fast-food worker Adam (Fayaz Arub). Adam has no direction in life and is about to be turfed out of his mother’s home as she prepares to move in with her boyfriend. Upon hearing that his estranged father has died, he begins a journey of discovery that leads him to some startling – and, possibly, very misguided – conclusions. From here it all gets a little bit sci-fi, but Hussain keeps the film grounded in Fayaz’s reality, a scream stifled by the roar of motorway traffic.

Between the Temples

From August 23

A rom-com set among the denizens of New York’s self-styled ‘progressive’ Jewish community, Nathan Silver’s new film is a low-key delight, pitched somewhere between the upper-west-side neurosis of the Baumbach-Stillman school and Harold and Maude’s odd-couple comedy. Jason Schwartzman plays Ben, a cantor at a synagogue swallowed up by depression after the death of his wife. As our sadsack hero hits rock bottom, he runs into an old music teacher (Carol Kane, terrific), who first asks and finally insists on enrolling as his bat mitzvah student, despite being in her late sixties. Thus begins a strange journey of discovery bringing teacher and student face to face with mysteries of faith and romantic connection – and, in one cringingly funny climactic scene, a car-crash dinner party to rival The Bear’s.