After wowing the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival, winning the Golden Bear for Best Film, and Silver Bears for Best Actor and Best Actress, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation hits British shores. A powerful, deeply moving film and an early contender for next year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar.

The second instalment of this madcap Bollywood trilogy is a truly bizarre film that includes some scenes that really need to be seen to be believed. It’s certainly entertaining, but perhaps not for the right reasons, and if you’re new to Bollywood please don’t judge it on the basis of this alone!

First released fourteen whole years ago, Australian country music drama Doing Time for Patsy Cline is an aspirational story which, in all probability, won’t make you aspire to very much except maybe possessing a thorough knowledge of quantum physics so you can build a time machine and make sure it stays in 1997. That.

A lo-fi gross-out horror without charm, wit or scares, Eaters: Rise Of The Dead does at least achieve one accolade: making partaking in a Nazi-zombie invasion seem preferable to watching a lo-fi gross out horror without charm, wit or scares.

At 2000’s Cannes Film Festival, Lee Chang-Dong’s film Peppermint Candy was the talk of the Director’s Fortnight. In 2007, he assisted Jeon Do-Yeon to a Best Actress award at the same event for her role in Secret Sunshine. And last year, the writer-director picked Best Screenplay for his latest film, Poetry. Opening here on July 29th, it will be Chang-Dong’s first UK release A powerful look at an older woman’s struggle to retain both her moral compass and her sense of self – all we need say is that it’s about time.

The second feature film from Julie Bertucelli, acclaimed director of Since Otar Left, The Tree stars Award-winning actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, newcomer Morgana Davies, and is based on the much-loved Australian novel, Oh Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe.

Dawn (Gainsbourg) and Peter live together with their children in the Australian countryside. In the middle of their garden stands the kids’ favorite playground : a massive Moreton Bay Fig tree, whose branches reach high towards the sky and roots stretch far into the ground.

One day, Peter dies of a heart attack, crashing his car into the tree trunk. Dawn is left alone with her grief and four children to raise. All of them naturally go looking for comfort under their protective tree, which becomes even more present in their lives. The young daughter, Simone (Davies), thinking that her late father whispers to her through the leaves, settles in the tree and refuses to climb down from it. But as the tree is growing unusually big – branches infiltrating the house, roots destroying the foundations, the family will need to make an excruciating decision to be able to go on with their lives…

The Tree stars actress and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg whose previous credits include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, for which she received the Best Actress Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

The Tree will be released in cinemas 5th August 2011

There’s no denying the devastating emotional impact of Incendies; it’s a tale of war, of frustration, of grief, of revenge and of survival against all the odds. Centring on a daughter’s desire to unravel her mother’s mysterious past, it’ll stay with you long after the end credits. Just don’t take any snack that could be fashioned into an impromptu noose.

Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise is like marmite: you either love it, or hate it. Admiration for these films may or may not come from being an ultimate sci-fi geek, but one thing’s for sure Transformers: Dark of the Moon sure does know how to get your various lubricative juices flowing (a mechanical pun in case you wondered. Wash out your crude minds!)

If you have any interest in the history of the nuclear arms race and how it affects us today, go and see the new eye-opening documentary by Lucy Walker as it talks through the miscalculations and madness of nuclear bombs and politics in a film that educates, campaigns, and shocks.

Studio Ghibli has done it again. Arrietty, inspired by the Borrowers novels of Mary Norton, is an incomparably beautiful story which effortlessly draws the viewer into a rarified world where a bay leaf makes a decent raincoat and cockroaches are the size of (shiny, aggressive and antennaed) Shetland ponies. Delicate, thoughtful and visually unmatched by almost anything we can think of, this is a very special film indeed.