Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.

Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.

The malign influence of the big city on countryside folk has fuelled filmmakers since cinema had the means to produce feature-length productions. In 1927, with the America-made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F. W. Murnau brought the disruptive forces of the urban to a farmer in the form of a woman. Following her back to city, he suffered the consequences. In this tradition Metro Manila, filmed in the Philippines, has nothing affirmative to say about the islands’s capital city.

If you're going to make a film whose title mocks a particular tone of voice, it helps to have a voice of your own. And that turns out to be one of the many hugely beguiling aspects of In A World ... , the actress Lake Bell's first film trebling as writer-director after years playing goofball also-rans in films starring the likes of Meryl Streep. A wry look at Hollywood and the (sometimes) wonderfully whacked-out people who inhabit it, the venture takes its name from the doomily spoken opening words beloved (or not) of movie trailers.

BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.

One of the most mystifying of working relationships is that between an artist and model. For any sitter the experience must be tiring, if not tiresome, but for the artist their compliance is as integral as paint or clay; one may become famous, while the other remains anonymous, the silent partner in a work of art; there’s also the fact that, in the most common permutation, the arrangement involves a man staring for hours at a naked woman, without reproach – and where else can you find that? Well, filmmaking.

In the remarkably meagre annals of Formula One movies, there are only two scores to beat, to wit: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (from 1966), a fictional story which used oodles of real racing footage, and Asif Kapadia's spellbinding documentary Senna (2010). Ron Howard's Rush slots in somewhere between them, being derived from the true-life Seventies rivalry of Niki Lauda and James Hunt but consciously shot and written like a drama.

We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.

How we look at and value art, the stuff we accumulate around us, and our daily surroundings; how we look at and communicate with each other (or avoid doing so in the digital age); and if we do or don't see: these are some of the themes explored in Museum Hours, an immersive docufiction made in Vienna by the experimental, socially progressive Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen.

The question of what makes a romance click on screen – what combination of elements goes into creating that indefinable spark between two projected faces – is one of the most eternal for filmmakers. David Lowery’s wistful, lyrical neo-Western has just over 10 minutes to make you invest in doomed lovers Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) before fate and justice do them part, and succeeds with breathtaking ease.