God love Bill Murray. Just when you think you can't take yet another film about the cross-generational divide that finds crotchety older person transformed by the company of youth (and vice-versa), along comes Murray's latest star vehicle, St Vincent, to inject new life into a more than time-honored conceit in a movie that feels quietly revelatory in all sorts of small ways, as well.

Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester (pictured below right), whither director Andrew MacDonald and his crew hastened with cameras at the ready .

“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.

Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode.

David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past.

There is ice at the heart of German director’s Dietrich Brueggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg). Winner of this year’s Berlinale Silver Bear for best script – the director wrote the film in collaboration with his sister Anna – it’s a chilling look into the psychology of extreme religion, in this case very traditional Catholicism, set in small town Germany. Formally impressive, it’s unsparing in its point of view in telling a tragic tale.

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.

An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety.

This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu), is a monumental film. Not merely in its scale – though at 196 minutes, it certainly clocks in on that front – but in its emotional heft.

It’s like one of the great Russian novels, and in his seventh feature Ceylan shows the influence of that country’s culture more strongly than ever (remember the direct references to Andrei Tarkovsky in the wintry Istanbul of Uzak, his first prize-winner at Cannes back in 2003?).

Clearly the makers of this delightful film from New Zealand have watched a lot of movies, as so many are neatly and obliquely referenced – Nosferatu, The Blair Witch Project, The Lost Boys, Grease, to name just a few - in a comic tale about a group of vampires in Wellington.