Mark Doherty and Dylan Moran teaming up to try and deal with a house determined to frame them for murder? Yes, please! A farce so dark it’s like a black hole put on some sunglasses because it was hungover. Hungover on Guinness.

A superbly upsetting film, We Need to Talk About Kevin sees Lynne Ramsay and Tilda Swinton join forces to emotionally brutalise their audience in a fantastically realised adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s beast of a book.

INSIGHT ALERT: politics can sometimes be a bit of a mucky business. There. Everyone was thinking it, but God knows it had never been articulated before George Clooney bravely blew the cobwebs off our antiquated belief that politicians are all selfless good guys working for the benefit of Joe Q. Public. The Ides of March is snappy and competent, but its hackneyed ‘message’ is dated beyond belief.

Louise Wimmer is a film about a divorced French cleaning woman in her late forties who lives in her car. Couldn’t be less tempted, could you? OH, YE OF LITTLE FAITH! Touching without being sentimental and instructive while resisting preachiness, this is a likely-to-be-missed gem which you’d do well to catch.

The debut feature from award-winning LFS graduate Julian Kerridge, Seamonsters is as full of aspiration as the teenagers whose story it tells. If only it had their flair. Determined to cram every possible plotline going into an hour and a half of frenetic nonsense, this is a far worse film than its talented young stars deserved.

Set over the only two days of the week we don’t despise, Weekend tracks a brief, fiercely intense romance that blossoms unexpectedly after a one-night stand. Lovely performances and canny direction elevates what could be a fairly slow-moving mumblecore flick into something quite special, presenting a refreshingly honest account of the joys and frustrations of sudden, deeply inconvenient passion.

Filmmaker Tristen Patterson followed sometime pro-skateboarder Josh “Screech” Sandoval for a year in order to create his slice-of-life documentary Dragonslayer. The result is a thoughtful, subtle and – if at times a little frustrating – largely engrossing film that manages to both revel in a world of time well-wasted, as well as nudging us unapologetically in the direction of its consequences. It’s not going to change your life, but it’s a loving little homage all the same.

There are three scenes in Sleeping Beauty: Someone Being Horrible To Emily Browning With Her Clothes On, Someone Being Clinical To Emily Browning As She Takes Her Clothes Off, and Someone Being Horrible To Emily Browning Wearing No Clothes. Mix and match as you desire. It’s a poised and classy-looking directorial debut from writer Julia Leigh, but it’s nonsense all the same.

Don’t let the name fool you; Dirty Pictures isn’t a charming piece of erotica. Sure, it MENTIONS sex, but… never mind. Instead, the film actually offers an amusing look at the life of “the godfather of ecstasy”, Alexander Shulgin.

Have you ever got up one day and thought “Today, I’d really like to watch a drama about competing Talmudic scholars at an Israeli university”? No, neither had we. More fool us, frankly, because Footnote is absolutely superb – funny, poignant and cynical, it will draw you into a rarefied world you never knew existed.