A United Kingdom (February 17)

BBC Films / Fox Searchlight

Another stately biopic from Amma Asante, the director of 2013’s Belle, A United Kingdom follows the romance between Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), the Prince of Botswana, and office clerk Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), and the controversy their eventual marriage faced when he returned to lead his country’s independence movement. As she did with Belle, Asante is once again examining the tensely calibrated racial politics of British colonialism. The film came out in Britain last year, and while reviews were mixed, one critic called it a “stirring interrogation of British identity.”

Lovesong (February 17)

Strand Releasing

A hit from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Lovesong is the fourth movie from the Korean American director So Yong Kim, whose three previous features In Between Days, Treeless Mountain, and For Ellen all showed significant promise (playing to fairly small audiences). Lovesong stars Riley Keough as a mother in her 20s and her fraught, romantically charged relationship with a good friend (Jena Malone) that plays out over several years. Kim’s films tend to subdued and pensive, but not without tenderness, and Lovesong looks like it will follow suit.

Raw (March 10)

Focus World

Every so often, there comes a film whose release is accompanied by stories of audience members passing out in shock, running out of the theater screaming, or vomiting; by that metric, Raw was the success story of last September’s Toronto Film Festival. A teen coming-of-age drama mixed with a cannibal horror thriller, Raw is the debut feature from the French director Julia Ducournau; it follows a vegetarian college student (Garance Marillier) who becomes, well, a cannibal. Critics are boasting that they “didn’t faint,” which is always the buzz you should be looking for.

Personal Shopper (March 10)

IFC Films

The newest effort from Olivier Assayas (the French master behind films like Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Clouds of Sils Maria) is a strange, haunted odyssey starring Kristen Stewart, who plays a young American woman in Paris going through a sort of personal crisis. Part horror movie, part muted workplace drama, Personal Shopper divided critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is likely to baffle viewers with its elliptical ghost-story plot. But Assayas is one of cinema’s most fascinating artists, and in Stewart (who gave a dynamite performance in Sils Maria), he may have found a new muse.

Free Fire (March 17)

A24

This anarchic action comedy comes from Ben Wheatley, the brilliant, if confounding British director behind indie horror delights like Kill List and Sightseers and last year’s more ambitious, dystopian epic High-Rise. The latter was an impressive adaptation of a challenging J.G. Ballard novel. Free Fire is a more stripped-down tale, following a group of arms dealers and gangsters who meet in a dilapidated warehouse, come to blows over a gun-running deal gone wrong, and spend the rest of the movie, well, shooting at each other. Brie Larson stars, the cast includes Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, and Noah Taylor, and the entire film is topped off with a garish ’70s aesthetic.