Sally Hawkins can’t help but melt hearts in Made In Dagenham, a forgivably fluffy account of the women’s Ford strikes in 1968. Mixing fact and fiction with a dollop British good humour, its an uplifting yarn that restores your faith in the human capacity for justice. Well, the women-human capacity, anyway.

Best For Film pitched up at the very end of this year’s London Spanish Film Festival to watch a deeply odd film about the life, love and constant petty theft of an enormous Spanish prostitute. Watch Mónica del Raval if you enjoy racist subtitles, chicken and chips and/or sweeping statements about geographically standardised penis size.

At the invitation of the Swedenborg Society, Best For Film is publishing a special series of reviews to follow its ‘Images of the Afterlife in Cinema’ film season, which will be exploring life, death and everything in between. This week things have been getting distinctly non-triumphant for the rock gods of 1991 San Dimas – Bill S Preston Esq. and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan.

The latest offering from Paul Andrew Williams (known for 2006’s London to Brighton), it would be difficult to describe Cherry Tree Lane as the sort of film anybody would watch for enjoyment. The story of a London couple held hostage in their own home by some seriously disgruntled youths, it is uncomfortable viewing from start to finish; rarely has there been a film that could make you feel more horrified at what is happening onscreen. You won’t want to watch and yet, curiously, this is precisely why you must.

Tracing the history of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, best known to many as the company of soldiers portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, this three part documentary series relives the do-or-die missions of the paratroop regiment that played a key role from World War II through to Vietnam. Featuring dramatic testimony from the men who were there and using rare footage from the Division’s own film archives, The Real Band of Brothers offers a captivating inside view of armed conflict – but the lack of a firm relation to the Steven Spielberg tele-drama may leave some viewers disappointed.

A robot and a chicken go together like… two opposite things stuck painfully together with superglue. The chicken’s all like “cluck” and “I’m eating and stuff, no seriously I am, check me out” and the robot’s all like “I want to make ner-ner-ner robot sounds and take over the world but I can’t because half of me is a chicken”. And then we have Robot Chicken Star Wars. Which is something completely different. Are you ready? Robot… Chicken… Star… Wars. Superglue it to your brain.

World’s Greatest Dad is a comedy about masturbation, suicide and the cult of personality – classic laugh-a-minute territory, I’m sure you’d agree. But wait! From this apparently gloomy subject matter emerges a brutally funny and twisted film which features Robin Williams giving his best performance in many years. By turns touching, disgusting, hilarious and insightful, this is not a film you want to miss.

You know the Cravendale adverts? You know, the stop-motion animation where a cow, a pirate and a cyclist all live together, living off milk and competing in musical statue for the last glass? Well, picture a feature length film in that style, in French and with more imagination then you could use to power the whole of Whoville and you’ve got the gloriously absurd and playful A Town Called Panic.

For explorer George Mallory, Mount Everest was to be man’s last great conquest – The Wildest Dream. But during a fateful expedition in 1924, Mallory disappeared behind a wall of cloud just a short climb away from the mountain’s peak. He was never seen alive again. Did Mallory make it to the summit 30 years earlier than the recognised record holders? This intriguing documentary intends to find out. But although watching it is by no means an uphill struggle, sadly its makers possess only a fraction of Mallory’s bravery.

Imagine that all that was once gold has turned to rusty iron. Yeah, it’s bad, but most of us have too many responsibilities and not enough in the bank, to just go swanning off for a year. But say if you were an unhappy, attractive American woman with money to spare who longs to “marvel at something”, then you probably wouldn’t find yourself laying about in your pjs, picking fluff out of your bellybutton. Most likely you would go galavanting off into the sunset. Puh-lease. Come back to the real world, Julia Roberts.