My Favourite Cake review – lovely, quietly subversive late-life Iranian romance

A lonely widow seizes the day in this bittersweet comedy drama, which drew the ire of the Iranian authorities on its release earlier this year

‘The main issue was always the hijab’: the Iranian directors arrested for their gentle septuagenarian comedy

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, makers of My Favourite Cake, received an ovation at the Berlin film festival while under house arrest in Tehran. They speak about the struggle of creating art under a dictatorship

Fawzia Mirza and Amrit Kaur on The Queen of My Dreams: ‘People want to hear more queer Muslim stories’

Mirza’s feature debut may have started with a wish to better understand her conservative Pakistani mother, but the joy it finds as it hops from 90s Canada to 60s Karachi speaks to big questions about south Asian identities

The Count of Monte Cristo review – highly enjoyable French costume spectacle

Three Musketeers screenwriters Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte move on to Dumas’s swashbuckling tale of revenge with verve

‘Everyone recognises her now – me, not so much’: Arthur Harari on how Anatomy of a Fall catapulted him and Justine Triet to film power couple status

The Oscar-winning co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall on starring in a new hit courtroom drama, his fear of a rightwing France, and why he’d rather be behind the camera than in front of it

Paradise Is Burning review – compelling Swedish drama of three abandoned sisters

United by love and feral freedom, the girls dodge the clutches of social services in Mika Gustafson’s beautifully performed feature debut

Black Dog review – ex-con and stray dog bond in searching Chinese social drama

Guan Hu’s low-key Cannes winner is a heartfelt tale of redemption set against the dramatic backdrop of the Gobi desert

The Count of Monte Cristo review – a good-looking gallop through Dumas’ tale of revenge

Pierre Niney plays the man behind the multiple masks in this fast-moving adaptation that needs a touch more finesse

French film star Alain Delon dies aged 88

Celebrated actor and star of Plein Soleil and Le Samouraï has died, his children have said

Only the River Flows review – stylishly enigmatic Chinese crime drama

An overburdened detective investigates a series of murders in 1990s rural China in Wei Shujun’s slow-burning noir

Only the River Flows review – accomplished Chinese noir is intriguing and ingenious thriller

An ambitious police detective attempts to solve a series of murders from a disused cinema in director Wei Shujun’s crime drama

Werckmeister Harmonies review – Béla Tarr’s brooding masterpiece of a town sleepwalking into tyranny

Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film moves slowly around a small town where a very strange circus has arrived. Its eerie power has only grown in a time of rising fascism

About Dry Grasses review – rich, engrossing Turkish epic with a twist

A village teacher is accused of inappropriate behaviour in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s handsome, beautifully performed, three-and-a-half-hour fable

Coma review – vital signs are weak in Bertrand Bonello’s mopey lockdown drama

There are stabs of the same fear that made The Beast fascinating, but this tale of a bored teenager in a scary, affectless future is too unfocused

Crossing review – terrific Istanbul-set culture-clash drama

A stern Georgian ex-teacher on a mission to make amends with her trans niece learns a thing or two in Levan Akin’s rich, rewarding ensemble film