Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.

Fully retitling a foreign-language film for international release is a risky business. But it works very well with Russian director Alexei Fedorchenko’s melancholic drama Silent Souls.

Stephen Frears is one of a trio of great old British lags who’ve been knocking out films for the past four decades. But while you know where you are with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, with their deadly serious careers as auteurs, Frears is a more elusive figure. A directorial pragmatist, he has always unfussily followed the scent of a good story.

Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy.

There's nothing wrong with the film adaptation of the stage show Rock of Ages that more raunch and noise - oops, I meant noize - might not put right, assuming that an amiably dopy immersion in Eighties rock pop is your thing. One of those star-a-minute movies ("Look, there's Mary J Blige!"; "Wait, isn't that Catherine Zeta-Jones?") that may well have been more fun to make than it is to see, the director Adam Shankman enters into the flat-out silliness of the enterprise without fully embracing the correspondingly anarchic spirit.

Hailed in some quarters for its gruelling realism in the depiction of the work of the Paris-based Child Protection Unit (the French call it La Brigade de Protection des Mineurs), Polisse is another French cop drama but with tiresome pretensions of social concern plastered on top.

The wish to go back into your past, and change things with the knowledge you have in the present, must be a universal one. It’s the subject of Israeli-US director Dana Lustig’s A Thousand Kisses Deep, which manages to make fantasy come alive for its heroine Mia (Jodie Whittaker, outstanding in the role). With the help of time travel.

Nicely timed to coincide with London 2012, Fast Girls is a kind of athletic Bend It Like Beckham, although I doubt it will have that film's impact, either at the box office or on the careers of its stars. While the leads, playing a group of young female sprinters, are likeable and engaging, the film is a rather predictable story of overcoming hardship and conflict through sporting endeavour.

“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.

Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.