Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.

Terrence Malick meets Judd Apatow: that was the expectation when Texan auteur David Gordon Green unexpectedly swerved into broad comedy with Pineapple Express. Prince Avalanche finally fits that bill, after three big Hollywood studio films where the Green responsible for the intensely beautiful and romantic George Washington and All the Real Girls seemed to be vanishing out of sight. Green made it in secret in fire-damaged forest outside of Austin, Texas, as if on a guerrilla raid back to his roots.

Richard Ayoade's follow-up to the highly promising Submarine centres on another pretty hopeless young man; yet this time his protagonist's predicament is considerably more grave, even if matters are no less amusing. Based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and co-written by Ayoade and Avi Korine (brother of Spring Breakers' helmsman Harmony), The Double sees Jesse Eisenberg tormented by a duplicitous doppelganger. It's a moodily lit, impeccably designed neo-noir served with lashings of absurdist comedy.

In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities.

Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.

Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter.

Alexander Payne has never been one for flashy features and in his latest he tones things all the way down to monochrome, as if his intentions are more bittersweet than ever. It's a fittingly subdued aesthetic for a tale of a man on his last legs, reluctantly forced to confront his past.

There is no end to The Fifth Estate. Instead, like those outtakes at the end of cartoons and comedies, there are cut-ups from an interview with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. “A WikiLeaks movie?” he says wryly. “Which one?” Well quite. Assange is box office, and it’s the argument of both The Fifth Estate and the documentary We Steal Secrets that deep down this is what he always wanted: to be a screen hero.

As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.