Winter of the Crow (15)

Based on a short story by Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, the latest from director Kasia Adamik is a thrilling cat-and-mouse game set on the eve of Poland’s Martial Law era, starring the supremely talented Lesley Manville.Tightly wound British academic Joan, played by the always excellent Lesley Manville, travels to Cold War-era Warsaw to deliver a paper on the treatment of psychiatric illness.

Once in Poland, the professor is surprisingly caught in between a student uprising and escalating assassinations as authorities call in martial law.

Manville is phenomenal as a spiky, on-edge professor who’s pulled into something much bigger than herself and, as Joan’s stern armour unravels, she (and we) are coolly reminded of the narrowness of her experience after being dropped into a brutal world where theory isn’t going to cut it.