Staff Picks: Matt Wilshere

This snowbound endurance thriller, shot spectacularly on location in Iceland, stars Mads Mikkelsen as the sole survivor of an air crash, stranded somewhere in the barren wastlelands of the Arctic.

Shot without permits in Afghanistan, this spectacular and powerful redemption drama from the director of Son of a Lion brings a needed fresh perspective to conflict in the Islamic world.

With the vibrant and hilarious Slut in a Good Way, filmmaker Sophie Lorain, a veteran actress in her native Quebec, reframes the raunchy teen-comedy formula with an honest, adolescent woman’s point-of-view.

The transfixing Zhao Tao plays a tough, resilient woman in love with a small-time hoodlum in Jia Zhang-ke’s epic gangland romance, set against China’s relentless modernisation in the 21st century.

A twice-convicted killer stands trial for a third murder, though not all is what it seems, in this morally complex drama from the Palme d’Or-winning director of Shoplifters.

Guy Maddin’s latest cinematic fever dream is a madcap medley of excerpts from Hollywood movies and TV shows, re-edited into a lost surrealist melodrama inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Not the first film to unfold completely on computer screens, just the most exciting and emotionally resonant, this crime thriller takes us on a father’s (John Cho) frantic online search for his missing daughter.

Standing in for libraries everywhere, the magnificent New York Public Library is explored and extolled in the great Frederick Wiseman’s latest ode to the importance of essential institutions in politically tumultuous times.

‘Stranger than fiction’ doesn’t come close. In an age of hot takes and hype machinery, this mind-blowing doco is the rare WTF true story entirely worthy of its breathless hyperbole.

Maxim Pozdorovkin’s satirical documentary, fabricated entirely from Russian propaganda and YouTube videos, dives headfirst into the world of fake news – and Russia’s blind love for Donald Trump.