Heist thriller Fuze and other new movies everyone will be talking about this week

(M), 77 minutes

This erratic documentary begins with a disclaimer which warns, among other things, that some of what we’re about to hear “may be considered offensive”. What this means is that the soundtrack consists largely of taped recollections by Australian veterans who were POWs during World War II and routinely refer to their Japanese captors using racial slurs.

While the language is certainly of its time, the value of the film lies almost entirely in the unvarnished authenticity of these recordings, sourced from interviews originally done for the 2001 ABC series Australians At War and from other archives.

Rather than singling out individuals, the director Serge Ou and his team aim for a choral effect, letting voices flow together so we seem to follow a single unknown soldier on a journey through hell – starting out in Singapore’s Changi Barracks, moving on to the construction of the notorious Thai-Burma railway, and winding up in Japan, where the destruction of Nagasaki is visible from afar.

(M) 98 minutes

Fuze is a heist movie with extras. The heist, a bank robbery, takes place in a west London neighbourhood where an unexploded bomb has been discovered on a building site – a narrative tactic that gives us two crises at once, instantly doubling the film’s suspense ratio. And the cast includes not one, but two actors who have been touted as possible James Bonds.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, one of the front-runners in the bid to find the next 007, plays the film’s bomb disposal expert, Major Will Tranter, while Theo James, also on the Bond list, assumes a South African accent as Karalis, the leading bank robber, an expert in diamonds and how to identify and fence them.

The film is directed by a Scot, David Mackenzie, who is not new to heist movies. In 2016, he made Hell or High Water, which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture. Written by Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan, it’s a modern western that combines its bank robberies with an elegiac tribute to the end of the frontier era. It has a lot in common with the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

(M) 123 minutes

François Ozon, once an enfant terrible of French cinema, nowadays looks like an establishment figure, never more so than in this plush-looking black-and-white adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel The Stranger (previously filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1967).

In turn, the book is among the most securely canonised works of 20th-century French literature, a classic of existentialism (although Camus rejected the label). Even in the English-speaking world it retains a wide readership, especially as it’s brief and straightforwardly written enough to be studied in schools.

Still, the question lingers: what is this film really about? Ozon may no longer be bent on scandalising his audience as he was in his youth, but he still has a teasing side, nor has his source material lost its ability to puzzle and provoke.