Those of a certain age will remember the television series 21 Jump Street, a huge hit for the then fledgling Fox network in America. It ran from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp. The titular address was where he worked as an undercover cop, one of a team of youthful officers investigating crimes in high schools and colleges. Jonah Hill, who at 28 is far too young to have watched the original but no doubt caught one of its many reruns, is a fan and has now co-written, co-produced and stars in the film version.

The world has heard of Schindler’s Jews, who were saved from the gas ovens by the patronage of an enlightened German industrialist. Socha’s Jews are not quite so celebrated. There are number of reasons for that. For a start, many fewer Jews were saved in this narrative, and their story has not found its own Thomas Kenneally - nor until now its Steven Spielberg. But most importantly their saviour would never be mistaken for any sort of moral pin-up, being a burglar and black marketer who stashed his booty in the sewers of Lvov.

I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A.

A police procedural played out over a long dark night of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the magnificent sixth feature from Turkish writer / director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys, Uzak). So much more than a simple thriller, it transforms a murder investigation into something gratifyingly profound and perversely beautiful; its grizzled, largely unfamiliar faces and their tales of woe will remain with you long after the end credits roll.

Literary adaptations are a godsend to an industry that loves a good story but is too busy blowing the budget on chase sequences and explosions to pay a decent screenwriter. But among the glossy, desperately earnest adaptations (last year’s Jane Eyre, this year’s The Great Gatsby) there are also some quirkier reworkings that invite audiences to play an extended game of spot-the-classic – Clueless (Jane Austen’s Emma), Tamara Drewe (Far From The Madding Crowd) The Lion King (Hamlet – yes really).

Many a redoubtable British theatre talent has stumbled at the altar of cinema before, which is another way of saying that Bel Ami is hardly the first film to suggest that not every heavyweight of the London and international stage - in this case two such titans in Cheek By Jowl supremos Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod  - is to the celluloid manner born. Leading man Robert Pattinson deserves credit for thinking outside the Twilight box while only confirming one's sense that he, too, looks sadly adrift beyond his established habitat.

Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in a Bourne- or Bond-sized budget, but he has played up the flick's British roots with pungent use of some prime London locations.

With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.

Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Hyper-energized and calculatedly ramshackle – thus echoing its subject matter – the documentary traces the emergence of the sync-sound super-8 filmmaking craze from the alternative art and music scene oriented around the CBGB rock club on the Bowery.

Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Schleinzer has created a script that bears comparison to all three cases in ways that are incidental but also striking.