XX (15)

Soda Pictures, £7.99

GIVEN that Mary Shelley is its literary fountain-head, you'd expect the horror genre to be a solidly distaff concern. It isn't. Horror movies may be filled with “scream queens” and stock “final girl” characters – think Jamie Lee Curtis as the redoubtable Laurie Strode in seminal 1978 slasher flick Halloween – but off screen they remain dominated by male writers and directors. So XX is a breath of fresh air: the first horror anthology comprising films which not only star women but are written and directed by them too.

Among those behind the camera is musician Annie Clark, better known by her stage name of St Vincent and here making her directorial debut. The other directors are Jovanka Vuckovic, Roxanne Benjamin (who also co-wrote Clark's film) and Karyn Kusama. Among their themes are food, family, metamorphosis, body issues, birth, death and the nature of evil.

That's not to say there aren't some patchy moments. Benjamin's offering, Don't Fall, drops four slackers into a desert-bound creature feature that feels desperately unoriginal. But opener The Box is more satisfying: a boy on a train home after a Christmas shopping expedition with his mother and sister asks the man beside him what's in the gift-wrapped box he's holding. The man shows him, after which the boy stops eating. When he shares the secret with his sister and his father, they stop eating too. It's sad, tragic and fascinatingly creepy.

Clark's film, The Birthday Party, is quite the opposite, a blackly comic study of the party from hell shot in vivid colours in a glass-walled modernist house peopled by exaggerated middle class caricatures. And featuring a dead guy in a panda suit. It's probably the best episode of Inside No. 9 Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton never made. Closing the set is Kasuma's Her Only Living Son, which updates the idea of Rosemary's Baby then adds a neat twist. Linking the films and acting as a sort of framing device is a series of Jan Svankmajer-style stop-motion sequences by Mexican animator Sofia Carrillo. Extras include interviews with all five women as well as a Behind The Scenes featurette.

Adult Life Skills (15)

Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment, £8.99

ADAPTED from her own short film, Emotional Fusebox, Rachel Tunnard's feature debut is an occasionally mawkish but ultimately pleasing black comedy about emotionally-damaged Anna (Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker) and the survival mechanisms she employs following the death of her twin, Billy. These involve moving into the shed at her mum's home in rural Yorkshire, shooting eccentric home movies in which her own thumbs play the main characters, and updating the website on which she memorialises her brother.

Anna works at a little-used outdoor centre dotted with mole hills and run by the bossy Alice (Sightseers star Alice Lowe), and only starts to come out of her shell when she meets muddled eight-year-old Clint (Ozzy Myers), a cowboy-obsessed neighbour whose mother is dying of cancer, and is reunited with best friend Fiona (Rachel Deering), who has returned from a two year round-the-world jaunt. Hovering in the wings is lovesick estate agent (and budding novelist) Brendan (Brett Goldstein).

It's rude and crude, and Tunnard's earthy script is often laugh-out-loud funny. But it's the interplay between Anna and the two sets of women in her life – Alice and Fiona on the one hand; mum Marion and foul-mouthed grandmother Jean on the other (Lorraine Ashbourne and Eileen Davies respectively) – that gives it its weight. A quiet little gem of a film.

It's Only The End Of The World (15)

Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99

WINNER of the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes film festival, this sixth feature from 28-year-old Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan is based on Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1990 play about Louis, a successful gay playwright who returns to his family home to announce his imminent death from a terminal illness. Lagarce was HIV positive when he wrote the play and died in 1995, aged just 38.

Over the course of a single day, Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) smokes dope with Suzanne (Léa Seydoux), the younger sister he barely knows. He endures his loud and eccentric mother, Martine (Nathalie Baye). He does his best to re-connect with his brusque and aggressive brother, Antoine (Vincent Cassel). And he's introduced for the first time to Antoine's put-upon wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard), who seems to guess what's troubling him.

Conversations between the five are more like exchanges of fire. Despite that, nobody seems able to say what they really mean far less what they really feel, and Louis the writer rarely utters more than three or four words at a time, as his exasperated mother points out. The bickering ebbs and flows but never subsides, and barring the odd, colour-saturated flashback in which Louis remembers his childhood and his first, drug-fuelled sexual liaisons, Dolan frames his characters in almost constant close-up. It makes for an intense and powerful portrait of family dysfunction, made all the more troubling by the emotional detachment of its central character.