It’s the suffocating inevitability of what is done to the girl that makes you keep grimly watching. Mexican director Michel Franco’s film is about people with nowhere to turn, expressed most brutally in the bullying of its teenage heroine Alejandra (Tessa Io). But the title refers to the death of her mother Lucia in a car crash Alejandra was also in, which has left her burly, loving father Roberto (Hernan Mendoza) floating close to the mental edge, moorings loose and numb with inexpressible pain. Off-limits for aid, then, for his quietly practical, persecuted daughter.

Terence Stamp is rediscovered as a leading man once a decade. There was The Hit (1984), The Limey (1999), and now this. He reappears every time with his famous beauty weathered but more attractive, his masculine mystery deeper, steely dignity unruffled. Song for Marion pairs him with one of his great Sixties peers, Vanessa Redgrave, as long-married Arthur and Marion.

In the Fog, Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s second feature, shows the wartime world of partisans and collaborators fraught with moral uncertainties. Set in 1942 in German-occupied Belorussia, it returns to a theme much explored by Soviet directors, most notably Elem Klimov in his visceral Come and See. Loznitsa’s film, with the exception of a wider opening scene, is almost a chamber piece: three characters, slow-moving action, dialogue without a voice raised, no musical score.

Italian cinema’s resurgence can be felt in the ghetto-operatic sweep of Daniele Cipri’s cautionary Sicilian tale. Like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah follow-up Reality (also at the LFF), it shows an initially likeable working-class family unravelled by passing contact with temptation. For Garrone’s far more sympathetic family, that’s the prospect of fame on Big Brother. Here, a child of Palermo scrap-dealer Nico Ciraulos (Toni Servillo) is killed during a botched Mafia hit.

There’s more than a touch of the magic to come in Benh Zeitlin’s soaring 2008 short Glory at Sea, which sees a storm-ravaged community take to the sea to rescue their loved ones - who are anchored to the seabed in suspended animation. Zeitlin’s debut feature Beasts of the Southern Wild - which felled Sundance with its raggedy, semi-supernatural beauty – is certainly cut from the same generous-spirited cloth. Based on Lucy Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious, it’s as radiant and defiant as a string of fairy lights in the dark.

A sex comedy with a disabled hero involving frank sex scenes, a poignant drama about a man struggling to live a full life against the odds, and a love story prompted by the assertion “my penis speaks to me, Father Brendan.” The Sessions is all of these things and more, a rare animal that has one roaring with laughter while deeply touched by a story that is tender and profound.

Who knew that Tim Burton remaking himself would, in effect, bring him back to creative life? Of three highly anticipated horror-based "family films" released this Halloween season, Burton’s Frankenweenie would seem like the rank outsider. A stop-motion animated feature about a boy who loves his dead dog isn’t the kind of thing you’d take little Emma to see. It isn’t the kind of film to discuss at the family dinner table. Nor should you. This is not a film for small children or those of a nervy disposition.

Michael Winterbottom’s Channel 4 commission for a film on prison life resulted in this five-year experiment in the passage of time for jailed Ian (John Simm) and his young family left on the outside. The oldest of the four child actors was almost teenage by the shoot’s end. More prosaically, Ian’s time inside is marked on his wearily hardening face.

Featuring a towering, Cannes-award-winning performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt (Jagten) is a humane and horrifying story of the power of accusation from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen).

The latest film from innovative firebrand Sally Potter is something of a surprise given her back catalogue. Her last feature, Rage (2009) premiered on mobile phones and the internet and comprised a series of to-the-camera monologues; the one before that Yes (2004) was told in iambic pentameter; and, she is of course the maestro behind gender-bending masterpiece Orlando (1992).