THIS week’s releases are a curious bunch, with some intriguing ideas at play. As ever, some work is better than others but its a thrill to find filmmakers pushing boundaries.

First up - and not a million miles in concept from Steven Soderbergh’s recent i-Phone produced Unsane - is Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, starring Star Trek’s John Cho and Debra Messing of Will and Grace.

The first mainstream Hollywood thriller to be headlined by an Asian-American actor, Searching is shot from the perspective of computer web-cams and smartphones. Cho plays a father who attempts to track down his missing 16-year-old daughter by entering her computer and following her digital footprints.

If it’s a little tough to buy a teenager’s laptop wouldn’t be among the first places detectives would turn to in such a case, the premise remains timely. What with Apple’s Find my iPhone and Snapchat’s Snapmaps at play in modern tech, we live in a world where it is increasingly hard to completely disappear.

Add to this a talented cast in well-rounded roles and Chaganty has himself a strong film indeed.

More contemporary, techno-thrills this week come from Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, a sci-fi body horror about the vengeance of a man who is implanted with a chip that allows him to control his body after a mugging leaves him paralysed.

Best known for writing the films of James Wan - with whom he co-created the Saw franchise - Whannell made his directorial debut with 2015’s Insidious: Chapter 3. The Australian’s sophomore effort stars Logan Marshall-Green, last seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Betty Gabriel, who played the Armitage family’s disturbed housekeeper in Jordan Peele’s acclaimed Get Out.

Upgrade is as thoroughly old-fashioned as it is futuristic. It is very gory, rather slick and often a touch silly.

Finally, this week sees the release of Idris Elba’s directorial debut. The Luther actor, who has spent weeks denying he is to be the new James Bond, has chosen the novel by Jamaican-born Brit Victor Headley as his first film.

The film’s title - Yardie - refers to the slang term used to name Caribbean expatriates, stemming from the crowded government yards of two-storey concrete homes found in Kingston and inhabited by poorer Jamaican residents. It is, however, not the strongest of this week’s releases.

-Toby Symonds