Jesse Eisenberg’s second film of the LFF is Kelly Reichardt’s low-budget, simmering thriller, confirming his work-led choices since The Social Network. “This was the only blockbuster I was offered,” he deadpanned, asked at the first screening’s Q&A about the giant roles that must be coming his way. “I sure was surprised when I got on set...”

Playing against his wholesome appeal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's debut outing as a writer/director spins a comedy of internet porn addiction, love, family, church – and a man who loves to do his own cleaning. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Gordon-Levitt is Jon, a muscle-bound young greaser who loves the ladies but prefers his own hand.

The components of The Broken Circle Breakdown don’t seem as though they would make for a coherent whole. The film is Belgian with Flemish dialogue. Infatuated with bluegrass music and a mythical America, a leading character lives his life as a low-countries cowboy. It’s a poignant family drama. Yet little feels forced and nothing is played for novelty. You’d have to have a heart of coal to not tear up.

From the simplest of precepts Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu spins a marvellously tender story of parents and children in Like Father, Like Son, as well as a subtle portrayal of the nuances of contemporary Japanese society. The emotions resound insistently but quietly, like the melodies of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that recur through the film, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival.

Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.

Terrence Malick meets Judd Apatow: that was the expectation when Texan auteur David Gordon Green unexpectedly swerved into broad comedy with Pineapple Express. Prince Avalanche finally fits that bill, after three big Hollywood studio films where the Green responsible for the intensely beautiful and romantic George Washington and All the Real Girls seemed to be vanishing out of sight. Green made it in secret in fire-damaged forest outside of Austin, Texas, as if on a guerrilla raid back to his roots.

Richard Ayoade's follow-up to the highly promising Submarine centres on another pretty hopeless young man; yet this time his protagonist's predicament is considerably more grave, even if matters are no less amusing. Based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and co-written by Ayoade and Avi Korine (brother of Spring Breakers' helmsman Harmony), The Double sees Jesse Eisenberg tormented by a duplicitous doppelganger. It's a moodily lit, impeccably designed neo-noir served with lashings of absurdist comedy.

In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities.

Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.