There’s a whole genre’s worth of films that would be improved tenfold if they’d only focused on a different character, and it’s often possible to pinpoint a better candidate among the same film’s supporting cast. Zal Batmanglij’s undercover thriller The East focuses on Brit Marling as a former FBI agent who infiltrates an eco-anarchist group but (would you believe it) becomes sympathetic to their mission.

People do the funniest things. Seth Rogen is not one of those people. Or not this week. An amiable enough graduate of Judd Apatow’s school of slackers, stoners and other bromantic under-achievers, Rogen has in his time swum upstream by industriously tossing off scripts. Pineapple Express and The Green Hornet told of his one-tracked interest in do-gooding beta males, and his latest project travels down the same road, all the way to the end. This Is The End rounds off a kind of loose trilogy celebrating slobby moral infantilism.

If the Nazis had remained in power, and the Holocaust been hushed up and excused, how might an SS officer feel in his autumn years about those slaughters in Belorussian clearings? What happens when the culture that demanded mass murder simply continues, and the murderers are treated as heroes, free to bask in their rewards for half a century?

With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929.

"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion," writes Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, and it's these words that open Stories We Tell, fellow Canadian Sarah Polley's fourth film. This is Polley's first documentary - although it hardly does it justice to call it that. It starts by telling a family story - a story Polley herself is indeed smack bang in the middle of - which requires her to be both director and detective, and presents her with the seemingly impossible task of distancing herself.

The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters.

Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community.

Before Midnight is the third part in Richard Linklater's romantic series starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as star-crossed lovers Jesse and Celine. It's a sequence of films that began in 1995 with Before Sunrise (pictured below right), where the two spent a night wandering Vienna, falling in love. That was followed nine years later by 2004's equally delightful and even more insightful Before Sunset, which followed them on an afternoon rendezvous through Paris.

The story goes that Ben Affleck was in the running to direct the latest Superman "reboot", but decided against. "A lesson I've learned is not to look at movies based on budget," he said. "Story is what's important."

Ever wondered what Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel creator, not to mention superhero movie A-lister Josh Whedon, does during his down time? Well, apparently he gets his pals together to have a go at the Bard. And by way of proof, along comes Whedon's film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which plays like nothing so much as a home movie in Elizabethan tongue.