Cert (UK): 15 : 100 mins Directors

50/50

2011 USA Cert (UK): 15 : 100 mins

Directors: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Anjelica Huston, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Philip Baker Hall
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the somewhat portentously named Adam Lerner, a young writer working for a National Public Radio station in Seattle, who is told out of the blue he has spinal cancer with a 50-50 chance of recovery. He gets along with a little help and hindrance from his friends, family and fellow patients, and the movie and Adam himself treat his situation with considerable humour. The absence of self-pity and sentimentality is something of a change. The women involved, however, are given a rather hard time.

American: The Bill Hicks Story

2009 UK Cert (UK): 15 : 110 mins

Directors: Matt Harlock, Paul Thomas

Cast: Bill Hicks
Bill Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 32, was a stand-up comedian from a suburban, middle-class southern Baptist background. Hooked on performance from the age of 13, he evolved into a serious critic of American society. Hicks belonged to the mumbling, dragged-from-the-guts style of expressive, stream-of-consciousness comedy that developed from Lenny Bruce in the late 1950s, rather than the wisecracking, sardonic form of commentary associated with Bruce's contemporary, Mort Sahl.

Anonymous

2011 Country: UK Cert (UK): 12A : 130 mins

Directors: Roland Emmerich Cast: David Thewlis, Derek Jacobi, Edward Hogg, Jamie Campbell Bower, Joely Richardson, Mark Rylance, Rafe Spall, Rhys Ifans, Sir Derek Jacobi, Vanessa Redgrave, Xavier Samuel
Welcome back to the world's oldest fully functioning conspiracy theory: that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him. Screenwriter John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich have created an amusing and mischievous Blackadder-style romp, enlivened by cheerfully OTT performances from Vanessa Redgrave as the Queen, Rafe Spall as Will and Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford. By the end, it looks as if Dan Brown has been allowed to smoke crack in a secret room in Anne Hathaway's cottage.

Arrietty

2010 Japan Cert (UK): U : 94 mins

Directors: Hiromasa Yonebayashi

Cast: Keiko Takeshita, Mark Strong, Mirai Shida, Olivia Colman, Ryunosuke Kamiki
The Borrowers turn Japanese as the children's classic is lovingly reworked by the studio that gave us Spirited Away

The film is based on Mary Norton's 1950s Borrowers novels, in which miniature people live like mice under the floorboards. Here, the simple acquisition of a sugar cube takes on the suspense of a bank heist. Arrietty herself is a mini-teen curious to fly the family nest and learn more about the world, armed with a pin for a sword. But her illicit friendship with a sickly human boy threatens her family's secret existence and teaches her a thing or two about compatibility.

Bridesmaids

2011 USA Cert (UK): 15 : 125 mins

Directors: Paul Feig

Cast: Chris O'Dowd, Ellie Kemper, Jill Clayburgh, Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Matt Lucas
Wiig plays Annie, a single woman with a failed cake shop business who is asked to be maid of honour for her best friend Lillian (played by another SNL alumna Maya Rudolph, daughter of 70s soul singer Minnie Ripperton). The appointment seems to trigger some kind of meltdown in Annie, who can only see her childhood friend's happiness as a reflection of her own misery. Her jealousy deepens when, at the lavish engagement party, Annie meets Lillian's "new best friend" Helen, played magnificently by Rose Byrne.

Subtlety and character lift this hilarious comedy above the rest

The Deep Blue Sea

2011 UK Cert (UK): 12A 98 mins

Directors: Terence Davies Cast: Karl Johnson, Rachel Weisz, Simon Russell Beale
Rattigan's characteristically well-made play is set on a single day in a dingy bedsit in north London. It begins with an act of despair as Hester, 40ish estranged wife of reserved, 50ish high court judge Sir William Collyer, attempts to commit suicide (a crime in those days) by gassing herself. This action is dictated by the callously offhand behaviour of her lover, the 30ish Freddie Page, a handsome, feckless, sexually vigorous ex-Battle of Britain pilot. Davies elicits outstanding performances from his central triangle, all sympathetic in their various ways, lacking in self-awareness and victims of sorts.

The Descendants

2011 USA Cert (UK): 15 : 115 mins

Directors: Alexander Payne

Cast: Amara Miller, Beau Bridges, George Clooney, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Michael Ontkean
Matt is a workaholic lawyer, so dedicated to his legal practice that he's neglected his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), a flirtatious beauty obsessed with speed sports on land and water, and their daughters, the 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), a heavy-drinking, drug-abusing semi-delinquent, and the rebellious, intellectually precocious, foul-mouthed Scottie (Amara Miller). Troubles descend on Payne's characters the way sorrows come to Claudius in Hamlet – "not single spies, but in battalions".

Dreams of a Life

2011 UK Cert (UK): 12A : 90 mins

Directors: Carol Morley

Cast: Alix Luka-Cain, Cornell S John, Neelam Bakshi, Zawe Ashton
One grim day in 2006, acting on account of rent arrears, Haringey council officials broke down the door of a bedsit in a housing complex above Wood Green Shopping City in north London. This was occupied by a single thirtysomething woman, Joyce Vincent, whose corpse these officials then discovered, slumped on the sofa in the light of the TV set, which had remained on. She had lain there dead for almost three years: so long that it was impossible to determine a cause of death.

Drive

2011 USA Cert (UK): 18 : 95 mins

Directors: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Kaden Leos, Oscar Isaac, Ryan Gosling
He's a Hollywood stunt driver with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, wearing a sleek bomber jacket with a scorpion on the back. Secretly, he also works for scary criminals as a wheelman, a getaway specialist; he gets top dollar, because he's the very best. With no fear, he can drive at terrifying speeds with extraordinary manoeuvrability; he has a sixth sense for cop cars and police helicopters. But then Irene's man gets out of the joint, still mixed up in rough stuff, and just for Irene's sake, Gosling does one last driving job on his behalf, which of course goes horribly wrong. But then Irene's man gets out of the joint, still mixed up in rough stuff, and just for Irene's sake, Gosling does one last driving job on his behalf, which of course goes horribly wrong.

The Green Wave

2010 Country: Iran : 80 mins

Directors: Ali Samadi Ahadi Cast: Payam Akhavan, Pegah Ferydoni, Shirin Ebadi
Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary blends phone footage, animation and to-camera interviews to follow the course of the Iranian green movement during the disputed re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in June 2009. It's a film powered by the internet, in which the voices of Iran's reformists are relayed via blogpost readings and on-screen tweets to create a day-by-day account of events. Animator Ali Reza Darvish's drawings offer a flashcard guide to the protestors' emotional state; they're played skillfully across interviews with some of the thousands of imprisoned activists, as Ahadu pulls the curtain back on a government that was willing to imprison and torture its electorate. A blogger's quote lingers longest: "Endurance is the only option Iranians have." It's an immensely courageous, terribly sad statement.

The Help

2011 USA Cert (UK): 12A : 146 mins

Directors: Tate Taylor

Cast: Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Mike Vogel, Octavia Spencer, Sissy Spacek
Young Skeeter (Emma Stone) coaxes tales of rage from the below-stairs help and ruffles the feathers of the town's fragrant, Stepford-style racists. Tate Taylor's polished, handsome yarn (culled from the Kathryn Stockett bestseller) boasts some bold play-acting from Bryce Dallas Howard (spiteful society belle) and Jessica Chastain (brittle trophy wife) though happily they're very much the support chorus here. Instead, centre stage goes to Stone (who it could be argued is more catalyst than character anyway), Viola Davis's stoic, seething Aibileen and Octavia Spencer's indomitable Minny, who delivers the film's bumper payload of revenge.

Hit First, Hit Hardest

2010 Country: Denmark Cert (UK): 18 : 99 mins

Directors: Michael Noer, Tobias Lindholm

Cast: Dulfikar Al-Jabouri, Jacob Gredsted, Johan Philip Asbaek
This prize-winning prison movie is the grim tale of a first offender convicted of violent assault and sent to the grimmest wing of a Danish jail, where he's exposed to endless brutality and humiliation by warders and experienced fellow inmates. Everything is seen from his point of view, and what we are shown is far removed from those old Warner Brothers "Big House" pictures where you made friends for life and had lifers for friends, and quite unlike the popular conception of Scandinavian penal institutions as liberal, clean, well-lighted places.

Hugo

2011 France, USA Cert (UK): U : 126 mins

Directors: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Frances de la Tour, Helen McCrory, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Richard Griffiths, Sacha Baron Cohen.
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) has inherited a love of tinkering with machinery from his late father, and has quite recently taken over the job of superintending the station's clocks from his drunken uncle. Fate draws him into the orbit of a querulous old man, Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs an old-fashioned shop on the station selling toys and doing mechanical repairs, assisted by his 12-year-old god-daughter, Isabelle. Hugo becomes involved with the old man when he's accused of theft and has a cherished book of drawings confiscated. He is then assisted by Isabelle in retrieving the book, and in turn, when he discovers she's forbidden to go to the movies, he takes her on a great "adventure", a visit to the lost world of silent movies at a season of old films.

The Ides of March

2011 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 : 100 mins

Directors: George Clooney

Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, George Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, Marisa Tomei, Max Minghella, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling
The Ides of March is set largely in Cincinnati where the handsome liberal governor of Pennsylvania, Mike Morris (Clooney), is competing in the Democratic primary elections with his eye on the presidency. A man emerges from the darkness to speak with disarming honesty about his liberal political positions, but he's not Governor Morris, who is in fact a background figure. He's Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), a 30-year-old aide of great brilliance who is using a speech he's written for Morris to test and adjust the acoustics for Morris's public debate with a fellow contender. Gosling subtly suggests something indefinably suspect about his character.

Jane Eyre

2011 UK Cert (UK): PG , 121 mins

Directors: Cary Fukunaga Cast: Amelia Clarkson, Craig Roberts, Dame Judi Dench, Holliday Grainger, Imogen Poots, Jamie Bell, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender
The film starts three-quarters of the way through the novel when she seeks refuge at the remote home of the kindly vicar St John Rivers (Jamie Bell). We first see her stranded at a crossroads on a moor, disoriented and penniless, at the point where – as those acquainted with the book will know – she has fled from the enchantments of Thornfield Hall, her rewarding job as governess to the little Adele and her love for the rich Byronic Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbender), who has led her to the altar under false pretences.

Margaret

2011 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 : 149 mins

Directors: Kenneth Lonergan

Cast: Anna Paquin, J Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon
Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York. One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by Mark Ruffalo. With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible results.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 : 101 mins

Directors: Sean Durkin

Cast: Brady Corbet, Elizabeth Olsen, Hugh Dancy, John Hawkes
Sarah Paulson plays Lucy, married to a wealthy, priggish Brit called Ted (Hugh Dancy), and currently on vacation in their huge, lakeside home. Out of the blue, she receives a payphone call from her troubled younger sister Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), from whom she hasn't heard in years, demanding to be picked up from somewhere in upstate New York. Martha comes to stay, and it becomes clear she has escaped from a cult run by a deeply scary Mansonesque guy called Patrick – a chilling performance from John Hawkes – who had the creepy mannerism of renaming all his devotees as a way of establishing psychological ownership: Martha's new name was "Marcy May".

Melancholia

2011 Cert (UK): 15 ,130 mins

Directors: Lars von Trier Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Kirsten Dunst.
Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, a troubled young woman who is getting married, and Charlotte Gainsbourg is her sister Claire, whose millionaire blowhard husband, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has paid for a grand and expensive wedding reception at a fancy country-house hotel. There is a nice cameo from Udo Kier as the queeny wedding planner. But Dunst's perfect day is marred by emotional tensions, not least between her estranged parents, formidably but all-too-briefly played by Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt, and these tensions catastrophically unlock Justine's own tendency towards depression or indeed melancholia. Windup merchant Lars von Trier is back with a film about the end of the world – but it's not to be taken entirely seriously

Perfect Sense

2011 UK Cert (UK): 15 : 90 mins

Directors: David MacKenzie

Cast: Connie Nielsen, Denis Lawson, Eva Green, Ewan McGregor
This apocalyptic sci-fi thriller is set in Glasgow where, as in the rest of the world, a series of mysterious plagues is successively depriving people of their senses – first smell, then taste and so on. The events are experienced by a chef (Ewan McGregor) and an epidemiologist (Eva Green) who find love among the ruins. Each loss is followed by despair and chaos, before society recovers its composure and goes on. Is it due to environment? Or terrorism? Who knows? One thinks inevitably of Camus's La peste. It's a haunting picture, atmospherically photographed by Giles Nuttgens.

Post Mortem

2010 Country: Chile Cert (UK): 15 : 98 mins

Directors: Pablo Larrain Cast: Alfredo Castro, Amparo Noguera, Antonia Zegers, Marcelo Alonso
Alfredo Castro, plays a loser in 1973 Santiago on the eve of Pinochet's coup. He's Mario, a middle-aged civil servant working in the coroner's office who becomes fixated on the fading music-hall artiste next door – a woman with leftwing connections – just at the point when he's forced by the army to join a special unit processing the victims of military massacres. The climax comes when some top brass arrive to witness the autopsy on the corpse of Salvador Allende. It's a bleak film that becomes positively numbing in its relentless pursuit of that perennial theme, the banality of evil.

Project Nim

2011 USA Cert (UK): 12A : 93 mins

Directors: James Marsh
Project Nim was a sensational Pygmalion-type experiment devised by Professor Herb Terrace, a specialist in primate cognitive abilities at New York's Columbia University. In 1973, he wanted to see if a chimp (called Nim) could be taken into a human family and taught to communicate with sign language. Without any of the human participants acknowledging or even realising it, Project Nim was effectively a manipulative experiment in human sexual behaviour and family life.

Shame

2011 UK Cert (UK): 18 . 99 mins Directors: Steve McQueen

Cast: Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Michael Fassbender
Shame centres on the handsome Brandon (Fassbender), a successful senior employee of a smart company. Outwardly charming and confident, Brandon is soon exposed as a casualty of a bull-market culture where sex has been traded so heavily, so easily and in so many exotic flavours that the consumer has gorged himself sick. Brandon, for instance, appears to score about once a day but it's not nearly enough because he's immediately off to masturbate in the shower. Mulligan plays Sissy, his sister, who sings for her supper, self-harms for kicks and is surely pointed towards disaster. "We're not bad people," Sissy assures her sibling. "We just come from a bad place."

The Silence

2010 Country: Gremany Cert (UK): 15 : 120 mins

Directors: Baran Bo Odar

Cast: Burghart Klaussner, Katrin Sass, Sebastian Blomberg, Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Mohring
Burghart Klaußner (from Haneke's The White Ribbon) plays Krischan Mittich, a careworn detective about to retire after 44 tough years. He is haunted by an unsolved case: in 1986, an 11-year-old girl was abducted while riding her bike in a remote field, then raped and murdered. Her body was later found in a lake, and the culprit never caught. On the day of Mittich's retirement, and on the exact anniversary of the girl's disappearance, another girl on a bike is taken on the very same spot. Fans of The Killing – and, in fact, everyone – should rush to see this icy and gripping police-procedural thriller from Germany.

Snowtown

2011 Country: Australia Cert (UK): 18 : 120 mins

Directors: Justin Kurzel

Cast: Craig Coyne, Daniel Henshall, Louise Harris
A charismatic drifter brings horror to an Australian suburb in this shocking take on a notorious real-life crime.

Salisbury North is a jerry-built sink estate of squalid, one-storey homes where a population of boozy, chain-smoking derelicts eat junk food and live lives of quiet (and sometimes noisy) desperation as their children, when not playing video games, rush around in the neglected streets doing battle in shopping trolleys or on bikes. Into this anomic world comes John Bunting (Henshall), a bearded drifter with sparkling eyes and a cheap, seductive charm. Bunting is gradually revealed as a manipulative, homophobic, homicidal psychopath but is introduced as a bringer of vitality and organisation.

Take Shelter

2011 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 : 120 mins

Directors: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Kathy Baker, Katy Mixon, Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon, an actor specialising in blue-collar nutters, gives a shattering performance as an Ohio hard-hat who has premonitory dreams about an impending disaster. He visits a doctor and a therapist, reads a tome called Understanding Mental Illness, and visits his mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, to see if he's inherited her symptoms. But the dreams persist, as do the tempests he sees in the skies. He ends up borrowing money from the bank and equipment from his employers to build a typhoon shelter in the garden against the gathering storm and protect his loving wife (Jessica Chastain) and little deaf-mute daughter, while preaching to his neighbours.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2011 UK Cert (UK): 15 , 127 mins

Directors: Tomas Alfredson Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth, David Dencik, Gary Oldman, John Hurt.
The shooting, arrest and torture of the British agent Jim Prideaux results in a shake-up at the Circus that includes the expulsion of the ageing head of MI6, Control (John Hurt), and of his right-hand man, Smiley. Before his death, Control has given the eponymous nicknames to the suspects, attaching a photograph of each to a chess piece, and Smiley is the grandmaster who must play out this game against Karla, his manipulative opposite number in Moscow. Directed by Tomas Alfredson, who made the subtly suggestive Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In.

Treeless Mountain

2009 , Korea

Directors: So Yong Kim

Cast: Hee-yeon Kim, Mi-hyang Kim, Song-hee Kim
Much influenced by Ozu, this tender, minimalist picture by a Korean director long resident in the States is inspired by her childhood in Pusan. Two small girls aged six and three are left by their mother with an aunt in Seoul while she goes in search of her errant husband. The impatient, alcoholic aunt gives them a Dickensian time before shipping them off to Grandma in the countryside where they're treated rather better. It's a familiar subject, well handled and performed

Tyrannosaur

2011 : UK Cert (UK): 18 : 92 mins

Directors: Paddy Considine Cast: Eddie Marsan, Olivia Coleman, Olivia Colman, Paul Popplewell, Peter Mullan, Sally Carman.
Joseph (Peter Mullan) is a middle-aged, working-class widower, a foul-mouthed drunk, violent and self-destructive, and he's first seen kicking his dog to death in a back alley. The other central character is Hannah (Olivia Colman), a quiet Christian woman of a rather demonstrative kind from a nearby middle-class estate. An affecting, tentative friendship grows up between Hannah and Joseph, but neither undergoes anything that could be regarded as a radical change or that might be called redemption until, following a terrible revelation, there's a coda that takes place a year or so after the main action.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011 , Cert (UK): 2011 , 112 mins

Directors: Lynne Ramsay Cast: Ezra Miller, John C Reilly, Tilda Swinton.
What happens when bad children happen to good parents? Almost from birth, Kevin shows his mother no love, just pure hate; he doesn't just push her away, but plays with her mind, finding ever new ways to hurt her. The film asks us to face up to two big questions: where does "pure evil" come from, and how should we as parents or as a society respond to it? Lionel Shriver's award-winning novel has become a superb film, with director Lynne Ramsay putting her finger on unpalatable truths about parenting.

Wuthering Heights

2011

Directors: Andrea Arnold Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Nichola Burley, Oliver Milburn
The movie begins with the surly Christian gentleman-farmer Mr Earnshaw returning to his spartan home on the Yorkshire moors at Wuthering Heights with a teenager (Solomon Glave) he's found wandering the streets of Liverpool. Described in the novel as black-eyed with a dark complexion and possibly of gypsy stock, he is immediately identified in the film as black, and scorned as a "nigger". This feral child becomes a disruptive part of the Earnshaw ménage and is baptised Heathcliff, a name appropriately suggesting an abyss at the edge of a forbidding open space. Andrea Arnold, the British realist who directed this new Wuthering Heights, won major prizes at Cannes for her first two feature films, Red Road and Fish Tank.

The Yellow Sea

2010 Country: Korea Cert (UK): 18 : 140 mins

Directors: Na Hong-jin

Cast: Cho Seong-ha, Jung-Woo Ha, Kim Yun-seok
Ha Jung-woo plays Gu-nam, a penniless gambling addict who is a joseonjok, an ethnic Korean-Chinese living in China. His wife has left him to work in South Korea, but it is clear she has taken up with someone else. Embittered and desperate for cash, Gu-nam accepts a job from a local gangster: to get across the Yellow Sea (that part of the Pacific dividing mainland China from the Korean peninsula), whack someone in Seoul and be smuggled home. But Gu-nam has a secret plan in mind. He will go to Seoul, kill this guy – and then kill his wife. The movie morphs from a noir into a manhunt thriller and then an all-out epic gangland war whose weapons are not handguns but kitchen knives.