As every smart director knows, the real trick is to find insanely talented actors and ride on their coat tails. For instance, last year our insanely talented actress Abigail Hardingham won the BIFA Most Promising Newcomer Award, so Chris and I got the privilege of joining the selection committee for this year’s award. The long list we helped draw up was published last week and as we don’t the final vote I thought now would be a good time to shine a light on my personal favourites. These are some of the talents you should buckle to your hearts and build your films around.

Arriving fresh from TIFF, Barry Jenkins’ three act identity tale Moonlight comes eight years after his feature debut Medicine for Melancholy. Other than being about relationships and the complicating factors that distance people from each other, this new film bares little resemblance to that mumblecore debut, especially stylistically. The style of Moonlight however, may be more familiar to those who have seen some of the shorts Jenkin made in the period between the two features. In particular, two commercial commissions (Tall Enough made in 2010 for Bloomingdales, and Chlorophyl for Borscht in 2011) are both vibrant, bold short films about relationships – one fractured and the other extremely harmonious – that show a penchant for striking use of colour that Jenkins builds upon in Moonlight.

From the ages of 18 to 23 I worked as the part-time manager of a small secondhand DVD shop. Located in one of the more deprived areas of Brighton, the shop was a repository for the material detritus of local street drinkers, young mums and decrepit old men, who would exchange stacks of fag smoke infused DVDs for hard cash. There was little of much cultural value amongst the mountains of merchandise we bought except for a once a week haul of illicitly gained back-of-the-truck new releases. Once in a while though a customer (usually the same elderly man on his monthly excursion) would come in with a selection of art-house rarities, dubious exploitation films from Hong Kong or soft-core European erotica. One day the aforementioned customer arrived with a selection to sell and amongst them was a crudely constructed compilation tape of gruesome caught on camera incidents, akin to the controversial Faces of Death series of the 1970s & 80s. The blurb suggested a shock and awe filled rollercoaster of death squad executions, daredevil stunts gone wrong, bank robberies gone awry, car crashes, accidents and suicides. Given that this was before the pervasive aura of You Tube and it’s never ending compendium of bloody mayhem and additionally that I was a 20 year old with a strong impulsive streak and an ill-defined moral compass, I took the DVD for myself.

Schrödinger’s Cat has been much misrepresented. The thought experiment that pivots on a cat being simultaneously dead and also not dead was originally intended to highlight the essential illogic at the heart of quantum theory. However Louis Macneice was right, the world is “incorrigibly plural” and we are strangely comfortable with things being multiple. Antoine Fuqua’s revision of The Magnificent 7 is cynical, honest, bold and nervous all at once, a fitting metaphor for modern America.

When George Miller’s jury took to the stage at the awards ceremony of this years Cannes Film Festival, Toni Erdmann was the name on everyone’s lips. Amongst the heady scrum of Cannes royalty, – Jarmusch, Arnold, the Dardennes Brothers, sat the anomaly of Toni Erdmann, a 162 minute German comedy that had gained the highest Screen International jury score in recent memory (3.7/4), and better still it was directed by a women who had yet to make a significant mark on the international stage. Could this be the year that Cannes dispelled the growing notion it was little more than a self-congratulatory sausage fest, consolidating the status quo with it’s ever growing army of brow-beating male auteurs (only one woman has ever won the Palme D’or, Jane Campion for The Piano). Alas, no. Despite the unanimous praise and feverish certainty of Ade’s success, Miller’s jury confounded all expectations by awarding the Palme D’or to Ken Loach’s prosaic state-of-the-nation I, Daniel Blake, making Loach the newest member of the ‘Double Palme d’Or,’ having won previously for The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Emergency aborted. Please proceed as normal.

After the lacklustre southern gothic excursion of Stoker, Chan-wook Park has returned to his native South Korea with an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Retitled as The Handmaiden and transferring its Dickensian setting to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, The Handmaiden concerns the double-crossing machinations of three corrupt individuals; the fraudulent grifter Count Fujiwara, Lady Hideko a Korean lady who lives under the perverse tutorage of her sinister uncle and the titular handmaiden Sook-Hee a pickpocket from a family of rogues and forgers.

Well hi, last week’s post about how you can’t spoil a movie opened a can of worms. So many questions still unanswered, not least, why does anyone put worms in a can? Anyway, I thought many of you would like to read a defence of no-spoiler culture and the most eloquent was definitely that I received from my mate Adam. It goes roughly like this…

Ira Sachs is an intelligent, cine-literate director born in Memphis, Tennessee, later based in New York. His subtle, smart dramas echo his experiences of living in these two places, as well as drawing wider from his collaborators and influences.

When discussing films the etiquette is always not to give away the key beats of the story for fear of spoiling someone else’s enjoyment. Revealing those important final twists drives some into open fury, as if they’d just heard the date and manner of their own death. But can you really spoil a film? I mean, beyond the obvious like casting Cara Delevinge as a space witch? If the only reason to watch a film is to find out what’s happened, then surely that film has already been spoilt by the people who made it.

In July we hosted Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the all time great modern arthouse directors. A filmmaker’s filmmaker, Apichatpong won the Palme d’Or for his 2010 film Uncle Boonmee, having won prizes at Cannes for two features before that, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady, and has been a critical and festival favourite since his debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon.

Some warm and incisive words from the brilliant Thai director on the three finalists in July’s Film of the Month competition, below. These were three very strong films with no clear winner, as reflected by Apichatpong’s praise for each work.