Alienation effect: why film-makers can’t get enough of Franz Kafka

A string of auteur directors – from Orson Welles to Steven Soderbergh to Lorenza Mazzetti – have fallen for Kafka’s visionary brilliance, with always-intriguing results

‘Engrossing and mysterious’: the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece that might have been

Lyon’s Lumière festival screened a fascinating footnote to the great duo’s career: Behold a Pale Horse, an adaptation of Emeric Pressburger’s novel by Fred Zinnemann

‘I hope God gives me the strength to make more movies’: Scorsese addresses retirement rumours

Director tells press conference he has ‘more films to make’ after long-planned Frank Sinatra biopic and adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s A Life of Jesus both get delayed

The Outrun review – Saoirse Ronan impresses in a refreshingly unconventional recovery drama

The actor excels as an alcoholic who returns to Orkney in Nora Fingscheidt’s fine adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir

Nickel Boys review – Colson Whitehead novel becomes intensely moving story of a racist reform school

Adaptation of Whitehead’s novel about two young friends trapped by institutional abuse is told with piercing beauty by RaMell Ross

Maggie Smith, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen, dies aged 89

In a career that began in the 1950s, her roles ranged from Desdemona to Miss Jean Brodie, Virginia Woolf and Minerva McGonagall

Maggie Smith was the grandest of grandes dames – and a true cinematic superstar

Before she reached a new level of TV celebrity in the 21st century, Smith had a remarkable big-screen career, channelling her stage presence into the camera whether as Jean Brodie or her tragic, absurd ‘aunt’ persona

The Outrun review – Saoirse Ronan is mesmerising in sobering addiction drama

Heart-wrenching story adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir is as tough as its Orkney landscapes

Dragonkeeper review – kids’ animation in which a girl must save China’s last fire breathers

This adaptation of Carole Wilkinson’s children’s fantasy novel is let down by fairly average animation, oddly bland characters and some ill-fitting Bill Nighy-ness

‘I filed my copy from Waterloo station loos’: the Guardian’s theatre critics assess The Critic

Ian McKellen plays a theatre reviewer in the 1930s in the new film adapted from Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call – but how accurate is it?

The Critic review – Ian McKellen’s poison pen sharpens 30s society cosy-crime drama

As a jaundiced reviewer with a dangerous private life, McKellen brings glorious life to this story of sour toffs in a dishonest decade

The Vourdalak review – deviously fun horror is très drôle vampire chamber piece

A foppish French aristocrat encounters a clan of peasants and their blood-sucking patriarch in a deliriously camp period yarn

Harvest review – Athina Rachel Tsangari’s folk non-horror is an exasperating experience

Dastardly deeds are afoot in an imagined medieval village with unscrupulous landowners in this directionless study of inauthenticity

I’m Still Here review – loving family negotiates the horror of Brazil’s military rule

Walter Salles’s first drama feature since 2012 tells the story of the Paivas, whose sunny 70s existence is wrecked by the arrest and disappearance of their father

The Order review – Jude Law leads neo-Nazi-hunting thriller with confident authority

Law is commanding opposite an icy Nicholas Hoult in true-crime story about the takedown of a far right militia in the 1980s