Lushly produced to within an inch of its pictorially ripe life, the new Disney/Kenneth Branagh live-action Cinderella couples swoony imagery with a cloying message about compassion. But all its pro forma qualities fall away as and when Cate Blanchett takes to the screen, the actress as beady-eyed as she is bristling – and Branagh's film that much the better for it.

Six apocalyptic Argentine stories of revenge combine in this hugely enjoyable and extreme anthology. Producer Pedro Almodóvar must have been impressed by the perverse humour, and the lack of a handbrake as actions rocket out of control. Writer-director Damián Szifron is, though, the sole author of his characters’ nightmarish misfortunes.

If anyone thinks high fashion is an airy-fairy world populated by flibbertigibbets preoccupied with frills and furbelows, Frédéric Tcheng’s feature-length documentary Dior and I, a behind-the-scenes account of the race to prepare the 2012 Christian Dior couture collection in record time, should set the record straight. This is a serious business, with investors’ money and employees’ jobs riding on the quality and execution of one person’s artistic vision.

How would a sighted adult react to becoming blind? What would their anxieties be? How would they construct their new world? Could they construct one? All these questions are central to the Norwegian film Blind. Ingrid can no longer see and is attempting to find her way anew without sight.

Horror, fantasy, bleak humour and appalling taste combine to make The Voices that rare thing, a movie that defies packaging by soundbite. Iranian director Marjane Satrapi (of Persepolis fame), abetted by screenwriter Michael J Parry, has conjured a looking-glass world of simple, colourful surfaces and childlike charm, only to rip it away to reveal the gibbering psychosis beneath. 

“Loving people doesn’t save them” could be the epitaph to the young Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s exuberant, emotionally draining fifth feature Mommy. Its vivid colours, concentrated in an unusual square screen ratio, seem to burst out with devilish energy as we follow the attempts of a loving but stretched mother to look after her 15-year-old son who suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Naturally Sean Penn, earnest Hollywood liberal and hard-working humanitarian, didn't lightly undertake his role as professional hitman Jim Terrier in The Gunman. "The idea of making violence cute – I've never been interested as an actor in those things," Penn has commented. "But when I read this I thought there were a lot of real-world parallels to it."

Susanne Bier follows the disappointing Serena with a well-acted and worthy drama that confronts societal prejudice, the sticky issues around child protection, and our inability to see what's right under our noses. Despite the plot's predictable and manipulative machinations, A Second Chance is rendered compelling every step of the way by Bier's searching direction and a mesmerising lead performance from Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (Michelle Williams) falls for gentlemanly German officer Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts, pictured below with Williams).

Sally Hawkins, Rafe Spall and Eddie Marsan form a super group of supporting actors in this heart-warming British coming-of-age drama which follows an autistic boy on his journey to the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO).