Rebecca Hall gets slapped about - and more - during The Awakening, a putative ghost story that lands one of this country's most able and appealing actresses in many a tricky physical but also psychological spot. Whether audiences will go the distance with her may depend on individual tolerance for a film that plays like an overcooked British knock-off of the Nicole Kidman starrer The Others, complete with Dominic West on hand to contribute belated rumpy-pumpy and Imelda Staunton very visibly furrowing her brow.

In later years, when callow reporters would be sent to interview the wrecked legend Hunter S Thompson in his Colorado compound, at some point in the weekend, in between the drugs, booze and random gunfire that punctuated his days, the Gonzo journalist would betray unaccustomed nerves, and point his guest to a pile of typewritten pages. This was The Rum Diary, an attempted novel from the early Sixties he picked at for four decades.

A glittering egg cracks open and, waving a magic wand, Andrew Logan emerges riding his sculpture of Pegasus, the winged horse. He flies across London to waiting friends and relatives and, with one touch of his miraculous wand, transforms them into sparkling glamour queens.

You can forget “I am Heathcliff”. And abandon hope of “I cannot live without my soul” and “I love my murderer” while you’re at it. Andrea Arnold’s newest addition to the canon of Wuthering Heights adaptations is the story flayed so raw you can see bone. Jettisoning such fripperies as dialogue, fixed cameras and even for the most part avoiding professional actors, she takes period drama by the wing-collared throat and throttles it with gonzo relish.

World cinema – like its cousin world music – is an awkward generic term that we generally apply to the output of those far-off countries or cultures about which we know (and perhaps if we are really honest, care) little. Watching movies with subtitles which attempt to parse actions and customs that are alien to our Western mores may give us a cosy, self-righteous glow inside, but we are also relieved to know that we don’t have to live those deprived (though perhaps somewhat colourful and picturesque) lives.

Oslo, August 31st and The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) share more than a release date. One is a melancholic existential meditation and the other ostensibly a horror film, but both openly draw from earlier films, focus on an outsider unable to connect with society and use capital cities as background noise rather than window dressing. One is wilfully unpleasant.

British film-makers tend towards bipolarity. Where French cinema is broadly speaking about the middle classes, we tend to get films about one thing or the other. The national fixation with the past supplies stories about how the nabobs of yore lived (and, as importantly, dressed). But from Ken Loach onwards, British directors of another cadre have always had a real feel for the street, for that tranche of society which bumps along with nothing, where substance abuse is the rule rather than the exception. Such a film, more or less, is Junkhearts.

As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone, 1971 excursion to Britain, with Dustin Hoffman as a mousey American mathematician who accompanies new wife Susan George’s return to her rustic Cornish home, which in Peckinpah’s hands is as hostile as the badlands his western heroes rode through.

Chris New’s nervy intensity is the big news in Weekend, an intermittently affecting British film that ought to bring this terrific theatre actor (he played Alan Cumming's lover in his breakthrough role in Bent) to a larger audience on screen.

Actors who migrate between stage and screen are often asked in interviews to assess the different disciplines. The answers tend not to vary much. On stage, they explain, you have to make a gift of your performance. In front of the camera, that invasive piece of equipment, you have to be selfish, to hoard, and maybe send out depth-charged truths in the form of discreet flinches and flickers. That’s what’s meant to happen anyway.