It doesn’t look broken from above. Broken City now and then takes to the skies over New York to look down on the splayed conurbation. Grand views of the skyline find silver towers a-shimmer, blue rivers a-glimmer and autumn’s burnished-bronze trees aflame. Wow, you think, could we stay up here way more and spend a little less time down there in the squalor, the corruption and, worst of all, Allen Hughes’ risible coloured-crayon stylings?

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.

Emmanuelle Riva travelled all the way to Los Angeles for that? I doubt I’m the only one whose heart went out to the radiant French actress, newly turned 86, as the 85th annual Academy Awards drew to a long and lumbering close well into its fourth hour.

Suddenly everyone is noticing that Richard Gere, now 63, is a much better actor than he used to be in his aloof and self-regarding youth. In Arbitrage, written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, Gere plays powerful and privileged Manhattan hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller.

No your eyes don't deceive you - Terrence Malick has directed another film, released not even two years after his last offering The Tree of Life. If you've no idea why that's worth remarking on, the gaps between his last four offerings were respectively six, seven and - drumroll please - 20 years. To The Wonder may be in the same ballpark of beauty as Malick's previous picture, and sound as if it shares the same astronomical ambition, but where that film soared this one sometimes struggles.

Skipping across time and place – South Pacific 1849 to Cambridge/Edinburgh 1936 to San Francisco 1973 to UK (looks like England) 2012 to Neo Seoul 2144 to Earth’s post-apocalyptic Hawaii 2321 – Cloud Atlas is like a scary old punk who's actually quite nice. A simple and satisfying moral centre stops you from feeling its 172 minutes are a waste of time and its six stories don’t intertwine as much as play tag with each other.

You don't have to be highly impressionable to get a shriek or two out of Mama, but it would help, and I suppose there are filmgoers who may never look at walls in quite the same way again. Elegantly shot and boasting Oscar hopeful Jessica Chastain in Joan Jett-like form as an imperilled hipster, the movie goes heavy on portentous sound effects and creepy-crawlies. What it lacks pretty much entirely is common sense. 

Brilliantly played by Saskia Rosendahl, the eponymous teenage heroine of Lore (full name, Hannelore) faces a demanding double journey: both the physical slog through end-of-war Germany, a country fallen into chaos, and the more complicated process of acknowledging, like the nation itself, past Nazi complicity. On the cusp of adolescence, she's forced into adult responsibility for her younger siblings, just as her inner world of sexual feeling is awakening - everything pushes her towards maturity, and she must cope or perish.

Are films for the senior demographic the new rock’n’roll? As the population ages and people keep their marbles for longer, entertainments for the grey pound, as it’s charmingly called, must be laid on. The job of films like The Last Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and now Song for Marion is to tend towards the cheerful and the redemptive. Age is a bugger, they all accept, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings – or in the case of Song for Marion, till Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp have given their leathery larynxes a public work-out.

The great German-born director Max Ophüls admired Goethe, Stendhal, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, and the four films he made in France, following his unfulfilling post-war sojourn in Hollywood, are characterised by supreme literary elegance and wit. Their prime subject is the transient nature of love and the particular sorrow of women. His elaborate tracking shots and bravura pans are brilliantly harnessed to mirror the inexorability with which emotions alter over time.