Fortune, as a rule, does not favour Part Threes. Hollywood history is replete with sequels that outstrip their predecessors, but second sequels have an altogether patchier track record – for every Return of the King, there are five Spider-Man 3s.

Taking inspiration from classic westerns even as it vigorously sets itself apart, The Homesman combines the taciturn and muscular with a feminist bent, and manages to be stirring and sweeping while also embracing the odd. It's a gorgeous, painfully sad tale of a man who's been nothing but a disappointment to himself and a woman constantly disappointed by others who, together, shepherd three lost souls on a desperately treacherous journey.

James Brown has always been on my Desert Island Discs list, because, should despair threaten, his brand of propulsive funk could be guaranteed to make the castaway "Get Up Offa That Thing". But despite a compelling performance from Chadwick Boseman that vividly captures Brown’s blend of charisma, drive, self-absorption and business savvy, the film is short on Brown’s most defining characteristic – vitality. The result is a missed opportunity that ends up being good enough when it should be galvanizing.

More frequently and accessibly than his fellow veteran directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff has captured the pandemonium wrought by Nazism – in in his Palme d’Or-sharing masterpiece The Tin Drum (1979), its quasi-sequel The Ogre (1996), and The Ninth Day (2004). Though Diplomacy, his latest World War II drama, threatens an unimaginable Götterdämmerung that never came to pass – Hitler’s willed devastation of Paris and its population –  the tension it generates is undiluted.

In keeping with his impressive body of work, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Steve James approaches the details of the life of film critic Roger Ebert with honesty and the utmost respect. James was granted unprecedented access to Ebert in the final stages of his life in December 2012, just after he had been admitted to hospital for a hip-bone fracture. Though James didn’t realise it at the time his celebration and documentation of the life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic also marked the last few months of Ebert's life.

Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.

“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game.

Rock music excessively rewards its pretty young corpses. Edwyn Collins’ survival, like Wilko Johnson’s, is much more remarkable. Two massive strokes in 2005, when he was only 44, should really have finished the ex-Orange Juice singer. Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film plunges us without preamble into the dramatised, subjective reality for Collins back then.

It’s fascinating to catch the moment when an already great film director moves onwards and upwards, to another level. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev has been collecting major festival prizes for more than a decade, since his debut feature The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003. After that he became a regular at Cannes, with his follow-ups The Banishment and Elena; his latest film, Leviathan, came away from the Croisette this year with the best script award. Many critics there felt that it merited something more.

Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high school

When Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan (Keira Knightley) due to nothing more than an overwhelming desire to fit in with the rest of their group of friends, he starts a chain reaction which leads Megan to seek refuge with erudite teen Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz). Sent into a tailspin at the prospect of getting married, Megan tells Anthony she needs to take a week-long retreat but instead ends up crashing at Annika’s place and reaching back to her youth. Megan in turn finds a new friend in Annika’s father Craig (Sam Rockwell, pictured below), to whom she openly admits all her worst secrets.

Megan runs away from her close-knit group of friends who are all either settling happily into married life or on their way there and , though Siegel does poke fun at the conveyor belt marriage, she is surprisingly generous with her supporting characters. Knightley's energetic performance is entirely endearing; she bounces around in a beautifully shot wedding scene - which boasts the backdrop of Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle - like Lewis Carroll's Alice learning all manner of shocking new things.

Knightley shows off her comic chops as the cynical and neurotic Megan and she’s really rather funny. Siegel has written a witty, charming character for her to have some fun with and at the same time explore female arrested development. Likewise, Moretz is given a role that allows her to flourish. The two have great chemistry together. Rockwell brings his usual charismatic flair to his turn as a single father and chatty divorce lawyer. Previously, Shelton has directed from her own shorter scripts, in films such as Humpday and Your Sister's Sister, and left her actors to improvise. This marks the first time she has worked from someone else’s script and its traditional structure results in some loss of her usual naturalistic style yet still allows her to craft convincingly intimate moments.

Despite sticking close to formula, Say When makes a refreshing alternative to the man-child shtick of Adam Sandler. The simple gender role reversal and an eccentric lead performance which doesn't rely on cheap gags only further highlight the desperate need to shake things up. Shelton and Siegel make a great writer/director team who skilfully blend mainstream comedy appeal with genuine warmth and prove to be a positive addition to the romantic comedy genre.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Say When