Parthenope

From May 2

In Paolo Sorrentino’s first film to revolve around a female protagonist, everyone wants to know what Parthenope is thinking. It’s a question you imagine the director struggled with in developing the character, a young Neapolitan woman (Celeste Dalla Porta) named after a Greek siren whose beauty brings destruction in its wake. Part bildungsroman, part mythical reckoning with his hometown of Naples, Parthenope follows its protagonist through carefree early days in Capri, before a tragic incident leaves her facing an uncertain future back home. A career in academia seems to beckon after a brief stab at acting falls through, and through it all, Parthenope is seen through the prism of her many male suitors, all dying to unmask the meaning of her beauty. (This is a film that would fail the Bechdel test and then some.)

Sorrentino’s vision is lustrous and impressionistic, packed with the kind of surreal incident we’ve come to expect from the Great Beauty director. There’s a nice, if rather inconsequential cameo from Gary Oldman as the booze-sodden author John Cheever, who shambles off into the sunset with a great line about “not wanting to waste even a second” of Parthenope’s youth, and an even better supporting role from The Young Pope’s Silvio Marotto as her academic benefactor. But Sorrentino’s overly reverent treatment of his lead makes it a frustrating watch – I’d have killed for some of Pedro Almodóvar’s customary rude manner on the subject of beauty – leaving the vexed question of what our Parthenope is thinking something of a moot point.

Riefenstahl

From May 9

With her propagandistic films for the Nazis, Leni Riefenstahl helped pioneer the aesthetics of fascism. And yet she escaped the punishments meted out to many Nazi collaborators through her lifelong profession of political naivety. In Andres Veiel’s forensic deconstruction of her public image, we see her parrot the lines on national TV in the 1970s and receive an avalanche of calls, cards and letters in return, from German citizens grateful for the fig leaf of moral unaccountability she offered. The film forces us to bear witness, time and time again, to the bodies behind her aesthetic vision: the Romani and Sinti kids she used as slave labour in Lowlands, many of whom were later deported to Auschwitz; and an extraordinary incident where a mistranslated piece of set direction from Riefenstahl, while working as a war correspondent for the Nazis, resulted in the execution of 22 Jewish Poles. The film was inspired by producer Sandra Maischberger’s acquisition of Riefenstahl’s estate; it ends, with chilling prescience, on a recording of a call with an admirer in which the filmmaker predicts a return to “morality” in the German state within “one or two generations”.

Motel Destino

From May 9

Rebounding after his debut English-language feature, Firebrand, proved a corseted flop, Brazilian director Karim Ainouz brings the heat with Motel Destino, an erotic thriller so drenched in sleaze you could wring it from the bedsheets. When orphaned gang member Heraldo (Iago Xavier) goes on the run after a botched hit sees his brother get killed, he is taken on as a handyman by a couple running a seedy roadside hotel. Before you know it, he has shacked up with Dayana (Nataly Rocha), unbeknownst to controlling hubby Elias (Fábio Assunção), a Cuban collar-sporting charmer in the Bobby Peru mould. With popping-candy colour schemes that sear themselves onto the brain, it’s a sex-fuelled fever-dream noir underscored by powerful undercurrents of class and gender resentment.

Good One

From May 16

One stray line turns a weekend camping trip on its head in Good One, a subtly probing debut from director India Donaldson that turns on a brilliant performance from Lily Collias in her first lead role. The drama sees outdoorsy dad Chris (James Le Gros) take his teenage daughter, Sam (Collias), and best buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) away on a weekend hike through the Catskills. The vibes are good, except for a niggling undercurrent of tension between the two older men that sees Sam become a reluctant sounding board for their insecurities. Things finally boil over in a moment of indiscretion that blindsides Sam, and tests the bonds between father and daughter to breaking point. Donaldson’s film has a terrific ear for dialogue, mining themes of male insecurity and the shifting family dynamics that come with the transition into adulthood. But it’s Collias’s deeply internalised performance as Sam – a young queer woman with a surer moral compass than her two companions – that makes the trip worthwhile and reveals a star in the making.