The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe wi

Brendan Fraser’s mournful, basset-hound face finds a loving home in this affecting fable from director/writer Hikari.

State of Statelessness is the brainchild of the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective based in Dharamshala, home to the Dalai Lama and spiritual heart of the Tibetan community in exile. Four short films, each by a different director, address what it means to live in the diaspora without a homeland. And like a short story, each film offers a glimpse into lives spent in perpetual exile.

We might simply call it a dilemma, but Hollywood screenwriters call it a “crisis decision”, or maybe sometimes a “swivel”. It’s when there’s an impossible choice, in movies sublime or ridiculous, whether it’s Rick choosing between Ilsa and beating the Nazis in Casablanca, or – in the latter category – pointless superheroes choosing between a baby and the entire globe in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

When Hamlet the Dane talked about “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, it was typical of the way that Shakespeare generalised. The writer didn’t let you infer too much about himself. So when he specified one or two of the thousand shocks in the same speech (“To be, or not to be”), they involved rather impersonal, evasive things like “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office”. In this, his most famous soliloquy, Shakespeare remained all things to everyone – his “universal” quality that made his literary name while eternally frustrating biographers.

“So then I go and I make another cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with raspberry jelly and now I’m going to call Allen Ginsberg at exactly noon. Because he does his meditations and they told me to call him either at 11 at night or after 12.”

There is joy, energy – and no little irony – about the way that Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play and sing the parts of a working-class couple from Milwaukee with big dreams and big hair.

Song Sung Blue tells the story of a real-life couple, Mike Sardina (1951-2006) and Claire Stengl/Sardina, who formed a Neil Diamond tribute band in the early 1990s and performed in small venues, becoming local celebrities under the name Lightning and Thunder.

It’s 1952 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, seven years after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the Japanese empire, but one skinny New Yorker is still waging war against it, armed with street savvy, a motormouth and a traditional table tennis paddle.

Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.

The third of James Cameron’s world-building epics arrives 16 years after the first one, but only three after number two, Avatar: The Way of Water. Apparently proceedings were held up by Cameron and his army of technicians having to adjust to developments in technology, not least the gadgetry required for underwater performance capture.