The debut movie from director of Lance Hammer won both the Directing and Cinematogrpahy Awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 – and there’s a reason. Beautiful direction and brilliant performances from its three lead actors (all amateur) ensure a film of smouldering beauty, centring on an estranged Mississippi family racked with grief.

Recessions are rubbish, that’s pretty much a given. However, there is one distinct upside to the spectacular financial crash which has bankrupted and disenfranchised millions in the last four years; some really bloody good films have come out of it. We’ve had Up in the Air, Inside Job – and now The Company Men, which will make you empathise with a hugely well-paid executive more than you would have thought possible.

Described by debut filmmakers Brek Taylor and Elizabeth Mitchell as a ‘fairytale thriller’, Island sees a young woman journey to a distant Scottish island to seek vengeance for a lifetime of neglect. What results is a brilliant and ambiguous drama played out against the stunning backdrop of remote and rural Scotland.

Director Anh Hung Tran adapts Haruki Murakami’s bestseller into an entrancing vision of teenage angst. Drawn together by a shared tragedy two young people forge a painful and potentially destructive bond in 1960s Tokyo.

Edie Falco shines, as do the supporting cast in Nuse Jackie, a medical comedy/drama from Showtime, now entering its second season.

When future alien archaeologists dig up the remains of our culture, they’ll find coke cans, packets of exotically and confusingly-flavoured condoms, and many decades’ worth of brutality-based dramas. Who know what they’ll make of Legacy: Black Ops. Perhaps it depends if they’ve seen every single psychological thriller, every single film about espionage and corruption, and every single film about a single, complicated man who people just can’t seem to understand.

RP Kahl’s Bedways promises to explore themes of love, sex, bodies and cinema itself. Some might consider this a tall ask for a 76 minute porno. They’d be right.

Summoned to a remote cottage by relatives, a young man is preparing to leave to do volunteer charity work in Africa. But is this really what he or his family want? In a superlative British drama Joanna Hogg examines a family suffering a crisis of communication.

Zonad: low-budget Irish comedy featuring a sex starved fat bloke who may or may not be an alien. But isn’t. Taken in by the residents of a small village Zonad quickly makes himself at home, lusting after a virginal teenage temptress and drinking in the local pub. But the true nature of his identity is about to catch up with him.

In all honesty, you might not even need to read this review; Stonehenge Apocalypse is exactly as you imagined it when you saw the SKULL IN A MUSHROOM CLOUD on its poster. Still, know thine enemy and all that…