His films, even when they don’t work, tend to at least look gorgeous. Refn’s latest, The Neon Demon, takes his languid, super-stylised approach – which reached ennui-inducing levels in Only God Forgives – and distills it into a more focused, taut narrative, and is ultimately a much more successful film as a result.

The story follows an aspiring model, Jesse (Elle Fanning), who moves to the city to kick-start her career, and swiftly turns heads in the fashion industry with her youth and natural good looks. She very quickly falls in with makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) and her friends Gigi and Sarah (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), the latter of whom are immediately jealous of Jesse’s quick success. Jesse is innocent (and told to lie about her age) and overwhelmed, but her attitude becomes twisted by success and a conviction that she has no real talent beyond her looks.

In Only God Forgives, I felt Refn’s style overpowered what little narrative and character there was, leaving us with a film that, despite its surface beauty, was hollow and, frankly, boring. I was pleased, therefore, to find myself thoroughly enjoying The Neon Demon. Refn’s languorous style is perfectly suited to the poised, precise world of fashion, to the point that the themes of vanity and the monetisation of beauty crystallise into the very fabric of the film. Like Drive, this is a film whose powerful visual style and hypnotic soundtrack help build the narrative up to a point which it might not otherwise have reached. Refn and his collaborators give the film a very poised sense of tone and mood, which elevate and enhance the thin, genre movie plot. The whole thing is drenched in Cliff Martinez’s throbbing, undulating score – a fusion of electronica and pulsating noir tones. In places, the sound is as important as the visuals – Refn and Martinez clearly work as a cinematic pairing.

The film’s primarily female cast are all on deceptively good form, and while the script (by Refn, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham) doesn’t require huge range from all of its performers, the mannered style and delivery all work towards the film’s overarching sense of tone. The supporting cast are also on great form, from Karl Glusman as Jesse’s friend to Keanu Reeves’ sinister turn as the owner of the motel Jesse moves into. A word, too, for Alessandro Nivola as an unnamed fashion designer, who is just terrific, stealing every scene he’s in and providing one of the best outlets for the film’s sense of jet-black humour.

It’s important to note the prevalence of women who worked on this film, from producers to writers to Natasha Braier’s terrific cinematography, because although for the majority of The Neon Demon, Refn shoots his cast with delicacy, there are one or two scenes towards the end which verge on the problematic, in particular a brief dream sequence which feels unnecessarily exploitative, and a crass nude shower scene which feels leery and out of place.

Some of the riffs Refn draws on with the visuals and violence hark back to the work of other directors, but only in a loving way; I felt the film had a mood and style all of its own, and that it subsumed its world so fully that it even came to resemble it, in a sort of formalised satire. Yes, Refn is certainly not the first filmmaker to comment on the beauty industry, but he’s the first to do it quite like this. The Neon Demon is positive step in Refn’s career after the dis appointment of Only God Forgives, which promised so much but delivered so little. I found much to enjoy in its stylised world of bitchy models and disturbing, noirish imagery.

The text, published in 2009, has influenced much of this decade’s political and sociological thinking, but there is a feeling that its message, in its arch, statistical formulation, has not reached a wide enough audience to enter into everyday consciousness.

Enter director Katharine Round, a self-confessed arithmophile who found herself captivated by what The Sprit Level’s charts and graphs revealed about social inequality in the developed west. As she pored over them, however, she began to look beyond the figures. “It struck me that every point on those graphs represented millions of ordinary lives – the charts had a human meaning beyond a mere statistical correlation.” And so, The Divide came into being – a documentary about the personal, human side of inequality, and the micro side of the macro issues the book covers. As Round herself put it: “I wanted to tell the story through the voice of lived experience – not just statistics, but real people.”

The film follows seven people in the US and UK who are affected by the vast inequality these two nations boast. Most are in unsurprising situations – a care worker who wishes it wasn’t such a constant uphill battle to make ends meet, a KFC server and single mother saddened by the decline of her neighbourhood, and a Wall Street investor convinced that his wealth is fair reward for his superior intellect and capacity for hard work. These vignettes are touching, infuriating and, at times, warmly comic, but they do little to explore the issue of inequality and don’t really touch on the significance of the scale of wealth difference. Indeed, Leah – the aforementioned mother working at KFC – comes across as the film’s main subject, in spite of offering little that relates to its stated objective. This is a tough thing to say, as she’s a brilliant personality – engaging in front of the camera, witty and incredibly moving. You just can’t shake the feeling that these traits captivated the filmmakers a little too much, leading things a little bit astray at times.

Much more interesting, situationally speaking, are relatively well-off psychologist Alden and housewife Jen. Both, in different ways, demonstrate the extraordinary layering of wealth divisions in the US, emphasising that when top-to-bottom inequality is so unutterably massive, even those who would seem infinitely rich to most people around the world still struggle hugely. Alden wakes at 6am every day to exercise (his tame jogging overlaid with his own motivational tripe about ‘pushing the limits’ is by far the film’s funniest moment), then sees patients one after another non-stop, before heading home and more or less straight to bed. The exercise, if it can be called that, is to guard against the dreaded possibility of falling ill – he cannot afford a sick day, and studiously avoids public transport for the same reason. He spends very little time with his family, deciding that the best thing he can do for them is work himself to the bone to provide a certain lifestyle – at one point we join him and his wife as they check out houses in a gated community.

This brings us to Jen, who is living the gated community ‘dream’. This seems a level of opulence beyond the reckoning (or desire) even of most people in the developed world. And yet, she is subjected to constant reminders that her wealth might be enough to have bought a house there, but it is not nearly enough to live the gated community lifestyle – a lifestyle that sees people spend $10,000 on golf carts, which are converted with special kits to look like BMWs. Insulted for driving a car that isn’t brand new, for mowing her own lawn, and for having kids who look different to most of her neighbours’ kids (this isn’t clearly explained – we’re told her kids are blonde-haired and blue-eyed, but the implication is left hanging), Jen is constantly made to feel unwelcome. The coup de grâce comes when she reveals that a group of the richest people in the gated area, which is already guarded 24/7 by an armed security officer, is planning to request a second internal gate, creating their own gated community within a gated community.

It is this seeming insanity – this sense of the futility of social ‘progress’ and the non-existence of social mobility – that really drives home the film’s point about inequality. It is an unsubtle reminder of quite how mind-blowing the scale of inequality is in two countries that are considered wealthy, successful and developed places. Of course, this isn’t the only context we’re given – the seven stories are broken up with illuminating talking heads, including the ever-present Noam Chomsky and, much more enlighteningly, Sir Alan Budd. The latter advised the Thatcher administration on monetary policy, and thus had more than a small hand in setting the neo-liberal economic agenda that fosters and drives inequality to greater and greater extremes to this day. Fascinatingly, and to his immense credit, he offers no attempt to justify this legacy, and instead apologises for the terrible results (not least the elephant in the room – the 2008 financial crisis), which he convincingly claims to be consequences that he, at least, genuinely did not foresee.

Ultimately, The Divide is enraging for all the right reasons. It could be criticised for wandering a little astray at times, but this is simply a result of Round sticking to her guns and telling human stories, not statistical ones. That is not to say the film is devoid of context, but rather that it is pleasingly unfettered by its own agenda. Certainly, it will appeal more to those of a particular political persuasion, but I’m sure those on the other side of the debate would enjoy picking it apa rt almost as much as the rest of us would enjoy agreeing with and learning from it. It might even go so far as to touch a nerve with those too hardened to be convinced by statistics.

This is best exemplified by the city of Zootopia, a huge metropolis divided into regions to support all animal life.

It is in Zootopia that Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit from a small outlying settlement, wishes to pursue her long-held dream of becoming a police officer. But she quickly realises that although the different species may no longer be eating one another, prejudice still exists, and her fellow mammals are still capable of cruelty. There has never been a bunny police officer, and Judy is determined to be the first, despite protestations from her superiors. When Judy reaches Zootopia, Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), the head of the ZPD (Zootopia Police Department) is less than enthused by her presence. Judy struggles to be taken seriously and is denied meaningful case work though, inevitably, winds up embroiled in a case involving disappearing mammals, to which a fox by the name of Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) seems to be tangentially connected.

The film blends its family-friendly messages of inclusion and equality into an inventive storyline and imaginative setting in a way that only the most hard-hearted of viewers could fail to connect with. Zootopia is a visual treat, brimming with detail, and feels like a fleshed-out setting for the action. It’s also filled with charming characters, from the main cast to the numerous supporting roles, and has good fun with the traits of its animals, particularly in a great sequence mid-way through involving sloths. Ginnifer Goodwin gives Judy the requisite balance of determination and vulnerability, and Bateman is coolly funny as Nick. They are a winning double act and, once they are united, help to pick up the pace from the film’s slightly generic and overly sugary first act.

Ultimately, what separates Zootropolis from other family animations with similarly tried-and-tested themes is its sincerity and charming world. The voice cast are all on enjoyable form, and the storyline, once it kicks into gear, is not simply a vehicle for the message of the film, but an enjoyable caper in its own right, full of motion and invention. I must’ve been enjoying it because by the time the fil m’s intensely cheesy theme song, performed by Shakira in the form of an animated gazelle, began to play for a second time over the closing credits, I was practically singing along.

Set in New England at some point preceding the Salem witch trials, this taut horror stars Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie as William and Katherine, devout Christian settlers who, in the opening scene, are exiled from a settlement for only vaguely established reasons. They set up a homestead in the dreary fields outside a wood, and shortly afterwards their infant son goes missing from under the watch of their eldest daughter Thomasin.

William is a particularly pious man, caring and devoted to his family, but also strangely ineffective in his position as patriarch. Ineson plays him with gravelly voiced gravitas. His wife, Katherine, distraught by the loss of their child, begins to doubt her own children, particularly Thomasin – perhaps even her own faith. The resulting drama – the film carries the subtitle ‘A New England folktale’ – sees Eggers patiently allow the family to combust, every now and again treating us to flashes of the otherworldly.

The film’s dialogue is delivered with the vocabulary and syntax of the time, which lends an air of believability – and also of strangeness – to proceedings. Although Thomasin is the protagonist, we are given reason to doubt all members of the family, including William, whose unwavering faith casts doubts over his ability to think clearly, and in particular the younger siblings Mercy and Jonas, who spend an awful lot of time with the homestead’s only black goat, mischievously named ‘Black Phillip’. The only sibling withheld from suspicion is god-fearing Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), whose fate inspires greater levels of panic in the family.

Eggers’ film is more concerned with the issues of faith, family and coming of age than it is with actual witchcraft, although he cannot resist giving us a few flashes of some pretty disturbing imagery. What, ultimately, do these elements tell us? And what is meant by the evocative conclusion? That conclusion is preceded by a brilliant scene in which the camera lingers on Thomasin during a particularly sinister conversation.

That conclusion is welcome, because the mid-section of the film is a tad uneven. One melodramatic scene, played like an homage to the Exorcist, doesn’t quite hit hard enough, and is preceded by a series of dramatic movements that don’t quite come off, in which William’s paranoia causes him to rapidly shift allegiances. I also found the score a tad too pushy; although Mark Korven has created a mostly wonderful soundscape that complements the drama, there are occasions when it simply ramps up the volume for a cheap scare, which seems at odds with the film’s patient approach.

Whether or not you find The Witch’s treatment of the supernatural frustrating (you could argue that some elements simplify its tackling of the issue of religion) will depend on how you look at it. In the end, it’s perhaps more of a genre piece than it initially appears to be. Regardless, it’s a well  played, pleasingly sinister film. Not outright scary for most of its runtime, and not perhaps what many fans of mainstream horror will be expecting, but it has the power to disturb.