Director: Scott Cooper
Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton
Showtimes: 19.15, 11th / 11.30, 12th / 21.00, 16th

Who doesn't love a heavy-hitting crime drama? Scott Cooper clearly does, switching from Crazy Heart to this Boston tale of corruption. His folk drama featured two fantastic turns from Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell and he draws two similarly gripping turns from Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton.

Depp plays the notorious gangster Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger, a part that could seem similar to his role in Public Enemies, were it not for Depp's transformed appearance. Looking more like a vampiric Christopher Walken than a drug dealer, he sports his slicked hair and blue contacts with a chilling stare that speaks volumes about his ruthlessness. Edgerton, meanwhile, proves himself one of the best character actors around with another generous performance as John Connolly, an FBI agent who works with Bulger to bring down the Mafia - only to unwittingly strengthen his childhood friend's grip on the local crime scene.

Edgerton's is the more interesting character - his increasingly gelled hair visibly rising as his moral integrity sinks - but Cooper's film keeps trying to make Bulger its lead. The result is a unfocused landscape of lowlives, albeit one that grips because each actor's role is so well performed. Even Benedict Cumberbatch, who is unnecessarily cast as Jimmy's political brother, Billy, brings clout to his bit part. Stitched together with superb editing, from title years and voice over testimonies to give an air of inevitable downfall to beautiful crossover fades that see cars driving on rivers and cities filling up faces, Black Mass ultimately loses weight by being over-stuffed, but this saga still carries an impressive heft.

Director: Johnnie To
Cast: Sylvia Chang, Chow Yun Fat, Eason Chan, Tang Wei
Showtimes: 20.45, 16th / 12.00, 17th

Is there a more exciting phrase in the English language than "a Johnnie To musical"? The director's eye for martial arts choreography makes him a perfect match for the glitz of Broadway.

Office does exactly what it says on the tin: the entire spectacle is based around the day-to-day goings-on in a workplace. The workplace in question? Jones & Sunn, a billion-dollar financial giant, which is just about to find itself on the wrong end of the financial crisis. There's CEO Chang (Sylvia Chang), who enjoys pushing other people's buttons more than those on her computer. There's David, who's desperate to climb up the company ladder and into her lap. There are bright young things Lee Xiang (Wang Ziyi) and Kat (Lang Yeuting), both eager to make their marks in the world - and, overseeing it all, Chairman Ho (Chow Yun Fat - who else?), who is also nursing a wife in a coma.

The cast through themselves into the fray with gusto, juggling the script's elegant balance of romance, inter-cubicle gossip, greed and ruin. The songs, though, are a little too one-note to fully jazz up proceedings: between the gentle piano ballads, it doesn't help that the lyrics, due to translation from Cantonese to English, end up somewhere between literal and poetic (one tender scene about dreams and hopes discusses the concept through metaphors involving wind and pigs).

But that challenging idiosyncrasy is a snug fit for what is an undeniably snazzily-dressed number. The set design is some of the most stunning of recent years (Wong Kar Wai's regular collaborator, William Chang, deserves an Oscar): the whole production takes place inside a warehouse of pipes and glass, an angular world that fuses the artifice of modern finance and unfaithful relationships with a beautiful sheen. Indeed, To's camera is the real star of the show, swooshing behind a gigantic timepiece in the middle of the stereoscopic stage. The actors cavort up and down stairs, their clothes gradually moving from the monochrome of office attire to colourful ball gowns and lingerie of the night. All the while, the absurd clock ticks over everyone's professional and private lives. The music may not earn a promotion into your list of favourite musicals, but Office is a show-stopping achievement. Spreadsheets have rarely seemed glamorous.

Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby
Showtimes: 18.30, 16th 14.15, 17th

Immigration has never been a more pressing issue for the world at large, but it's something that has always been a part of civilisation: the need for the booming human population to move elsewhere, whether by necessity or desire, and make a new life. Jacques Audiard's Dheepan explores the issue, but never in the way that you expect.

The film follows a family who relocate from Sri Lanka to Paris, where they must learn to fit in with the unwelcome locals. The twist? They're not a family at all: one's a Tamil Tiger (Dheepan - Antonythasan Jesuthasan) and the other can't speak a word of French (Yalini - Kalieaswari Srinivasan). Both are strangers, including their daughter (Claudine Vinasithamby). Shacking up in a shed on a housing estate, they're surrounded, respectively, by gangsters in the neighbouring block and bullies at school - hardly the escape they hoped for when fleeing the Sri Lankan Civil War.

The ensuing tangle of human relationships carries all the unpredictable mess of real life, from the challenge of sorting mail in a foreign language (Dheepan is a caretaker for the estate) to the haunting memory of being a soldier. There's even time for unplanned bonding with a gentle hoodlum.

Audiard has a knack for empathising with outsiders. Here, his film is full of them. "We're not from here," the French kid tells Yalini of their callous attitude towards drug-dealing. "That stops us giving a shit." She replies in her own tongue; a meaningful conversation in which neither can grasp the full meaning of what they're saying.

As the family struggle to connect with each other, things boldly wander from romance to violence and back again. Between Jesuthasan's shell-shocked, intimidating male to Srinivasan's heartbreakingly loyal wife (a scene-stealing study in silent nods, smiles and shrugs), the convincing result means we do give a shit; like the makeshift family unit itself, we're never allowed to settle in one genre for long.

Director: Mamoru Hosoda
Cast: Kumiko Asô, Rikî Furankî, Suzu Hirose
Showtimes: 18.15, 16th / 15.15, 17th

A little over a year ago, Studio Ghibli announced that it was shutting its doors, possibly for good. Who would make animations to enchant audiences the world over now? While Ireland's Tomm Moore continues to make a convincing case with the mesmerising Song of the Sea, he's got competition: Mamoru Hosoda, director of Wolf Children, whose latest is a thrilling tale of friendship and fighting.

The tale follows Ren, a young boy who finds himself alone when his mother passes away, years after his dad left. But we're first introduced to the kingdom of Jutengai, a parallel world full of beasts. There, the contest is fierce to become the new Lord. The challengers? The honourable Iozen and the towering Kumatetsu. There's only one catch: the latter needs an apprentice.

All this is related to us by burning embers, who fly around the screen, reassembling their scorches into people, buildings and places - a dazzling prologue to an equally beautiful 120 minutes, which swoops, swings swords and throws whales into crowded streets with colourful imagination. There are no prizes for guessing what happens when Ren and Kumatetsu cross paths, but their tale of paternal figure and young role model is impressively complex, taking time to acknowledge both Ren's real dad (something that a lesser family flick would overlook) and the fantasy universe's detailed mythology. The result packs in emotion and action galore: think How to Train Your Samurai Dragon, or Free Willy (So That You Can Punch Him in the Face). And yet there's still time to pause for a brief romantic subplot featuring Our Little Sister's Suzu Hirose, some classic literature and a welcome reminder that education is a key part of growing up and becoming strong.

Epic battles, heart-warming feelings and the merits of using libraries? The Boy and the Beast has everything you could want. The future of animation in a post-Ghibli world just got a little brighter.

Director: Sebastian Schipper
Cast: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
Showtimes: 18.10, 16th / 12.10, 17th

There's nothing more impressive than a film with a really long take. From Scorsese's Goodfellas and Kubrick's Paths of Glory to Welles' A Touch of Evil and Antonioni's The Passenger. Béla Tarr has a lot to answer for. But even he would be gob-smacked by Sebastian Schipper's film, Victoria, which unfolds in real time - in one continuous shot. For two hours.

The film follows the eponymous girl (Laia Costa), who finds her holiday in Berlin hijacked when she bumps into Sonne (Lau) and friends one evening. The pair get to know each other quietly, bonding with all the loosely-performed realism of Richard Linklater - then things take a twist for the dramatic.

Schipper's decision to shoot everything in one go is less bold and more outrageously bonkers, but it's breathtaking to witness. After all, even Hitchcock's Rope had to fake it. And he didn't even leave the living room. Victoria, on the other hand, goes everywhere, from clubs to rooftops to car parks to other people's living rooms. The genre shifts too, from romance to heist to drug-fuelled partying - a tornado of unpredictable twists.

That pacing helps disguise the slightly far-fetched plot, which escalates surprisingly quickly, but we also connect with the characters through the verisimilitude; we experience what they experience and, like Victoria, can only get to know the others based on that. Exposition, drama, violent; it all happens at the speed it does in real life.

And yet Schipper is also confident to allow that momentum to vary: the soft first act includes, amazingly, a piano solo by Victoria, which Costa would have played without an error live on camera, before going on to perform everything else for another 90 minutes. In the aftermath of that beautiful sequence, Victoria's frustration, anger and fear are even more astonishing to witness. They don't even pause to go to the bathroom. Thrilling, funny and all kinds of epic, Victoria is a relentless tour de force that doesn't let up. In your face, Bela Tarr.

Director: John Dower
Cast: Louis Theroux

Scientology. A religious movement that manipulates and humiliates its subjects in secret. Louis Theroux. A journalist who, arguably, does the same. The pairing of the two, then, is a mouth-watering prospect. Who better to expose the bizarre sham beneath the respectable surface?

One possible answer to that came earlier this year, when Oscar-winning Alex Gibney directed his own investigation into Scientology, Going Clear. My Scientology Movie could well suffer from being number two in this non-fiction race, but if Gibney's comprehensive takedown is thorough and objective, Theroux's delights in taking a more subjective, creative route.

The endearingly ramshackle film begins with Theroux - despite warnings from his followers on Twitter - popping over to Los Angeles to record the documentary. Of course, he's refused access to the church and its members. And so, with no Tom Cruise to talk to and no way to interview David Miscavige, the elusive head of the movement, he comes up with an innovative solution: he holds auditions to cast actors to play them instead.

That process is partly overseen by Marty Rathbun, former second-in-command to Miscavige, who departed the church in 2005 - something that left him blacklisted by the movement and harassed by its current members. He's considered bitter and unreliable by the church. In other words, the perfect subject for Theroux to toy with.

The always-likeable journalist bumbles along with his typically assuming presence, but it's clear that he's got another agenda in mind - and it's fascinating to see him at work, deflecting and playing innocent at every strange twist and dark turn. Within moments of him arriving on US soil, the presenter finds himself stalked by church representatives trying to intimidate him, a familiar sight for anyone who's seen a Scientology programme or film before, but one that becomes wonderfully farcical when exposed to Louis' comic light. As they bring along their own cameraman to film him and warn him off "private" property, he trades close-ups until they end up running away - hounded by his polite apologies and invitations to stay.

The auditions, meanwhile, serve not just as a way to give an idea of what's going on inside the church leaders's minds, or even a witty parody of the movement's own attempts at Hollywood productions, but to nudge Marty back into the headspace he occupied a decade ago. As drills and rituals - loomed over by Andrew Perez's terrifyingly violent interpretation of Miscavige - cut increasingly close to the bone, we see their lingering effect on Marty, even though they're not real. The result is a smartly self-aware demonstration of the brain-washing power of make-believe. You can't ask for a better study of Scientology than that. A masterful piece of non-fiction filmmaking, My Scientology Movie is hugely entertaining and extremely troubling viewing.

Director: John Cowley
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent

How do you build a life in a new country? That's the question facing Eilis (Ronan) in Brooklyn - until it's replaced by another, equally tough question: what if you then realise you could have an equally perfect life back where you came from?

Nick Hornby adapts Colm Toibin's novel for the screen with typical wit and heart, creating a story that manages to be full of both cheerful hope and painful nostalgia. Saoirse Ronan shines in the lead, the excellent make-up and costume team making her as plain and blank as possible in the vibrant, colourful New York scene. Her face, which so subtly shifts between emotions, is perfect for the conflicted part - ably matched by Emory Cohen's swoonsome suitor, who never feels less than certain about his feelings. You suspect he's only one smile away from heartthrob stardom.

Cohen is as charming as Domhnall Gleeson's boy back in Ireland is polite - between Star Wars and Ex Machina, Gleeson is on roll right now - while Julie Walters' hilariously uptight landlady helps to juggle the cheerful and sad mood.

It's the understanding of what makes a home, though, that gives Brooklyn its old-fashioned, moving magic. John Crowley shoots the tranquility of Wexford with a twinkle in his lens, but it's the gradual assembling of clothes, cosmetics, work colleagues and confidence that convinces; the attention to period detail (the film, curiously, wasn't shot in Brooklyn at all, but in Montreal) becomes an intrinsic part of character and plot development: as Eilis looks more and more American, her journey becomes more and more engaging. The result is a funny and unabashedly sentimental tale of belonging and starting over.

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Cast: Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Suzu Hirose

We live in an age where divorce and broken families are far from uncommon. Between old partners and new kids acquired through marriage, it's easy to imagine these lives as episodes from EastEnders, full of bickering and bad table manners. Not so, if you live in a Hirokazu Koreeda movie. Our Little Sister follows the surprise union of three sisters with the hitherto unknown fourth child of their father: Suzu, conceived with another mother. You'd expect shouting matches and melodrama to fill the screen, but the Japanese director's eye for human relationships has never been more tender.

Koreeda, whose last film - Like Father, Like Son - also screened at the London Film Festival, is a master of everyday detail, the kind of filmmaker who doesn't wallow in the kitchen sink so much as run a bath in it and enjoy playing with the bubbles and scouring pad. In his hands, even the most mundane of activities can become uplifting. For Suzu, that routine is crucial to her slow assimilation into the family unit - in between going to school, running late and dressing up for business, the group (played with easy chemistry between the girls) always find time for communal dinners, which look as delightful as the bond they represent.

All this takes place in the shadow of grief and uncertainty over what their father was like - combined with the appearance of a mother from the past, Hirokazu quietly draws the lines between each character's memory and perspective of the loved ones around them - but the script (based on the manga Umimachi Diary) allows that to inform their behaviour, rather than be the driving force of events. The most dramatic things that occur are one sister wearing another's blouse, or Suzu struggling to stomach the plum wine. The response? They promise to make non-alcoholic version for her - a simple gesture, but one that carries with it a substantial element of love. The result completes a series of films about parenthood, absence and inheritance, but is so lightly handled it could almost blow away in the breeze like a cherry blossom. Marvellous.

Director: László Nemes
Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn
Showtimes: 20.45 10th / 21.15 10th / 13.00 11th

Son of Saul, a film that depicts the day-to-day survival of a man in Auschwitz-Birkenau, is not an easy movie to watch. It's an even harder movie to hear.

Director László Nemes - astonishingly, making his feature film debut - has crafted a shocking piece of cinema, which brings concentration camps to life in a new way. They have appeared on screen before many times, from the black and white of Schindler's List to, most recently, the vampire horror TV series The Strain, but never with such alarming immediacy.

The film follows Saul, a Hungarian who holds the post of Sonderkommando, which involves the handling of everyday exterminations. But when he recognises a boy in the gas chamber, Saul decides to give him a proper burial - and so he tries to find a Rabbi to recite the correct prayers.

Whether or not the boy is his son is never clear, but the quest consumes Saul, a futile, yet all-encompassing attempt to retain some semblance of humanity and dignity in a place where numbered people have neither - one of the first things prisoners ask each other is what country they're from. Géza Röhrig is fantastic in the lead, his fixed, hardened frown conveying a surprising amount of emotion, as he annoys fellow prisoners with his inability to join in their escape plan. Saul is stoic, but movingly so; a last remnant of tradition rattling around inside a relentless machine.

Nemes' camera follows him through his tasks, from piling up bodies to shovelling ashes, almost always one step behind - a long-take approach that recalls the immersive power of Children of Men. The over-the-shoulder perspective, though, perhaps most resembles a video game, positioning Saul in a never-ending universe of increasingly horrible obstacles; no matter what task he completes, there is something harder to come.

If the onslaught inspires dismay, though, what is terrifying is how quickly you get used to it. The restricted POV leaves the nastiest things to occur off-screen; you don't see the atrocities of war, but you listen to them all. Screams, footsteps, fire, guns. That gruelling reality is Son of Sauls' grim achievement: capturing the sound of the Holocaust. As Saul soldiers on, his numb resilience rubs off on us, rendering the genocide as a constant background thrum. Every now and then, the deafening horror of it all breaks though.

Director: Sarah Gavron
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Ben Whishaw
Certificate: 12A

Say the phrase "women's rights" to people today and they may well roll their eyes or nod their head in understanding. Gender equality is a subject that has finally started to take centre stage, over 100 years since the suffrage movement began. For some, though, it remains a theoretical issue. Numbers are thrown around regularly. Salaries for men and women. The percentage of female directors in Hollywood. Suffragette takes the issue off the page and gives it a beating heart.

It's hard to believe that there hasn't been a major film about the movement before now - itself an indicator of how endemic sexism still is in 2015. That topicality, though, isn't just confined to off-screen: in director Sarah Gavron's hands, the film manages to feel less like a documentary about the past and more a story relevant to the present.

Our eyes onto events belong to Maud (Mulligan), a laundry worker with a well-meaning husband (Whishaw) and a well-behaved boy. All that is thrown off kilter, though, when she joins the movement through her colleague, Violet (Anne-Marie Duff). But Abi Morgan's script is less a tale of radical recruitment (with an excellent Helena Bonham-Carter as eagerly militant pharmacist's wife Edith Ellyn) than a document of social necessity: Maud isn't pulled into the protests; she's shoved in by the violent cops beating crowds, by her poor wages and by her abusive boss.

The cast are uniformly excellent, from Meryl Streep's rallying cry ("I'd rather be a rebel than a slave!") to Mulligan's heavily-cockney everywoman. In the lead, Carey's facial expressions are as fluid as ever, able to seem both innocently naive and world-weary. The men are equally well treated, as Whishaw's hubby finds himself unable to endorse her full rebellion and Brendan Gleeson's conflicted cop remains determined to carry out the law, regardless of his opinion. "They promised nothing, they gave nothing," he shrugs, as the women march on Parliament on the understanding that testimonies from working class women might be heard by the government.

Mulligan's delivery of her life story is enough to move a room full of men, but it's halfway through that Suffragette really hits its message home - when Maud says goodbye to her son, realising that the law says that he belongs to his dad, not her. The concept of disenfranchisement can be hard to convey with much passion, but Gavron and Morgan's achievement is to give that abstract notion a tangible, emotional clout. For Maud, her personal and political battle are one and the same; if the subject of legal rights doesn't bring you to tears, the sight of someone's child being torn from them will.

The only blemish is the absence of black women from the ensemble - a potential whitewashing of history that is evidently unintentional but nonetheless suggests that there were no black women in London in the early 1900s. If Suffragette fails to be equal in all departments, though, it certainly succeeds at paying tribute to those who gave up their family, their jobs and their lives for a cause that continues today. Inspirational and hugely moving, this is a historical drama that feels urgently present.