While Claire Denis seeks to avoid metaphor in her films, the French director’s sci-fi prison drama High Life, starring Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson, can’t help but raise big questions about the universe, the nature of time and even the meaning of life. “Everything in screenwriting is painful and yet it’s great. It’s great because the pain is the price you have to pay to be allowed to dream things, to make them real.”

Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Mary Stuart shares with the recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie a desire to portray rival monarchs Mary and Elizabeth I as sisters pitted against each other by the patriarchy.