Serge Gainsbourg, like Charles Bukowski, is one of those blokes who should be banned as a role model for impressionable young men, who may start imagining they too can behave like disgusting old soaks and pull any gorgeous bird who comes into their orbit. Note to Gainsbourg wannabes -  this only works if you're a creative genius as well.

Giuseppe Tornatore is known overwhelmingly for one international hit. There have been sundry other films from him in the 21 years since Cinema Paradiso won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but none which have sold such a seductive vision of Italian village life. Though damned to backwardness, stymied by introspection, Tornatore’s evocation of Sicily in 1950s was awash with vitality and colour. In Baarìa he finally goes home. Could he have another bittersweet blockbuster on his hands?

Although it has taken over a decade to come to fruition, Splice still feels like a timely piece of work with its macabre and gruesome take on notions of genetic mutation for commercial gain and the god-like delusions of the scientific community. In addition, it spits out poisonous barbs in the direction of dysfunctional parents who visit their own inadequacies on their hapless offspring.

Let me lay a friendly fiver that many critics will rubbish this film, for the following reasons.

The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.

Sex, blood and shocking - these are the things Catherine Breillat does well. So long as she's busting taboos wide open you can forgive her the longueurs, the wilful refusal to attend to fundamental principles of storytelling, her characters' inclination towards such dreary soliloquising you feel like yelling, "For heaven's sake, shut up and get back to the full-frontal fornicating!" At first glance, the story of Bluebeard would appear to be right up her street.

Inception is as lucid and heartfelt as summer blockbusters get these days. It is a rigorously built action spectacle about the persistence of memories and ideas, with an intelligent, committed cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.

The missing dimension in this low-budget British horror film is the one that would make it deserve a cinema screen: the element that leaves so many home-grown genre films earth-bound. Locking the characters in a high-rise flat to hack into the Vatican computer system and trigger the End of Days artfully combines the cheap and cosmic. But writer-director Brad Watson can’t make us believe in his contrived, flatly filmed scenario.

The missing dimension in this low-budget British horror film is the one that would make it deserve a cinema screen: the element that leaves so many home-grown genre films earth-bound. Locking the characters in a high-rise flat to hack into the Vatican computer system and trigger the End of Days artfully combines the cheap and cosmic. But writer-director Brad Watson can’t make us believe in his contrived, flatly filmed scenario.

London River is a film about not knowing. It is released five years to the week after four bombs went off in London and killed all those innocent commuters. Among the victims of terrorist jihad are not only the dead themselves but the relatives who wait for confirmation that the fruit of their loins, of their womb, might have survived. It is a far cry from Four Lions.