Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four’s a string quartet. Classical music movies tend to focus on the cost of individual brilliance. See David Helfgott in Shine, Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, not forgetting the talented little man who features in Amadeus. A Late Quartet homes in on that subtle and complex quadratic equation, a string ensemble which thrives on the interplay of four barely subordinated egos.

Whilst Zac Efron is getting urinated on in The Paperboy, his High School Musical co-star Vanessa Hudgens is taking the piss in an entirely different sense. In Spring Breakers Hudgens and Disney princess Selena Gomez bin their clean-cut images to hook up with James Franco's metal-mouthed miscreant during the US rites-of-passage party season. Harmony Korine's fifth feature gives us girls in bikinis packing heat. It revels in the fuck-you-I-won't-do-what-you-tell-me of it all and it's hard not to be seduced by its glamorously anarchic brand of entertainment.

In a just world, Papadopoulos & Sons should join Bend it Like Beckham, East is East and The Full Monty in the micro-genre of thoughtfully entertaining, low-budget British feel-good hits. But the UK cinema industry is not that world, as the makers of last year’s raw and hilarious East End entertainment Wild Bill, given up on before it got near an audience, would be only the latest to tell you. Greek-British writer-director-financier-distributor Marcus Markou’s debut has the odds stacked against it.

Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.

There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.

In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away from any formal diagnosis, but Grigsby caught the mood of three young Texans – David, Dennis and Lamar – back from the conflict and struggling to re-engage with a society that has become alien to them.

It begins with two gunshots. Lee Marvin is a guy who just wants his $93,000. "I want my money" is the mission statement for Point Blank, a film that is as timelessly entertaining as it is influential. But putting it that way doesn’t grab the sensation of watching a film that is so exciting you may forget to breathe for all 92 minutes of it.

Pulsating and cinematically proud with an opulent urban palette, Trance positively storms onto the screen. Fast becoming a national treasure (if he hasn't broken through that particular ceiling yet) Danny Boyle is also one of the few directors with the visual chutzpah to make a film this bombastically exciting set in the UK. A heist thriller located in a so-chic-it's-barely-recognisable London, Trance features the handsome trio of James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel.

When Craig Zobel’s true-life thriller Compliance played at Sundance, it was met equally with critical praise and audience outrage. There were walk-outs, complaints, shouting matches. At the London Film Festival last year, reaction was similarly polarized – one indignant viewer attempted to lead a mass walkout, rising from his seat during a particularly troubling scene with the rallying call of “Okay everybody, I think it’s time to go now!”

This is a fairy tale which may send children to sleep before the good bits, then wake them up screaming at the first glimpse of loping, bestial giants. Splicing Jack the Giant-Killer (subject of a 1962 kids’ monster movie which gave me nightmares) and the more familiar Jack and the Beanstalk, it has farmboy Jack (Nicholas Hoult) spilling the magic beans, and following mildly rebellious princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) up the resultant beanstalk to a stone kingdom of giants above the clouds.