Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once described his approach to the writing process as “trying to stop making sense, and create something that just has an effect”. It’s an intention that’s easy to track in his sophomore novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which uses an idiosyncratic mix of prose, pictures and blank pages to spin its two narrative strands.

Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities.

In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts.

Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony.

American documentary directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have made a reputation with stories that study, as they describe it, “variations of truth and falseness”. Their latest, Girl Model, is just that, in spades. It tells the story of 13-year-old Russian teenage would-be model Nadya, plucked from the talent contests of Siberia to work in the potentially lucrative Japanese fashion market, where the premium is on youth.

Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.

Yasmina Reza first came to theatregoers' attention with her 1994 play Art, a very funny three-hander about friendship and intellectual pretension. God of Carnage, this time a four-hander but an equally astute comedy of manners peopled by another bunch of bourgeois characters, debuted in 2007 - and now Roman Polanski has adapted it for the screen, co-writing the screenplay with Reza and moving the action from Paris to New York City.

Is it a voice coach Sam Worthington needs? He plays nothing but Americans – even in the mythological mash-up Clash of the Titans - but come those moments of what passes for heightened emotion in his performances, the Kiwi vowels will out. There is a lot of heightened emotion in Man on a Ledge, or at least height, being set on a ledge from which a man is threatening to jump. Close your eyes and you could be in Kaikoura or Wanganui,  or Invercargill.

Charlize Theron proved her acting chops, and won an Oscar in the process, playing a serial killer in the movie Monster, but surely her brilliantly realised Mavis Gary in Young Adult is very nearly as monstrous, albeit in a different way. Emotionally fixated to the point of pathological single-mindedness, Mavis is every "psychotic prom-queen bitch" (the film's words, not mine) you may think you left behind in school but haven't. And though she's as fine-boned and alluring to look at here as Aileen Wuornos was both pasty and pockmarked, don't be fooled.

Drawing us deep into the coercive, immersive world of a sinister sect, in its audacity and provocatively luscious aesthetic Martha Marcy May Marlene announces its first-time writer / director Sean Durkin as a major new talent. Durkin ingeniously emulates his young heroine’s disorientation as she fights for her sanity and - as the more-than-a-mouthful title suggests - her identity. Its credibility is buoyed by a courageous and psychologically complex performance from its young lead, another newcomer Elizabeth Olsen.