A teenager bonds awkwardly with her cousin as they take the bus from a rural community to New York so that she can have a termination

The four words in this title are the four possible replies to bureaucratic tick-box questions about the frequency of your various sexual experiences. A young woman here must answer them, before she is allowed to have an abortion. However rigid and blandly routine it seems, the four-part answer grid is cleverly designed to get information about vulnerability: it is so easy instinctively and evasively to deny a difficult question structured as a yes/no, but much harder to check the “never” box, when “rarely”, “sometimes” and “always” are coolly offered as equivalently non-judgmental options.

The lead character in Eliza Hittman’s tough, realist drama is confronted with this central, four-part inquisition about her life in one brilliantly controlled, enigmatic scene. Theoretically, it is just a bit of form-filling that doesn’t appear to promise any real revelation to the audience. Yet it does just that, delivering a penny-drop moment of realisation. Or perhaps it’s more of an ambiguous hint and all the more disquieting for that.

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For his latest drama, Corneliu Porumboiu revived a language unique to the valleys of La Gomera in the Canary Islands; a steep learning curve for his actors – and our writer

Try to imagine the least film-noir scene possible and you might come up with a group of five-year-olds learning to whistle. It is late morning, pre-lockdown, in a classroom at Nereida Díaz Abreu school on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the teacher – a bent knuckle crammed in his mouth – is relaying instructions in a piercing, swooping, set of whistles. The kids look quizzically skywards, then collapse in hysterics, although most eventually nail it.

“Touch your left ear with your right hand,” the teacher reiterates in Spanish.

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We say to the kids: when you go to Tenerife and say you’re from La Gomera, people will ask you if you can whistle