When the infantilisation of Hollywood started in 1977 with Star Wars, as a 10-year-old I was all in favour. The hugely successful Transformers franchise based on a series of clever 1980s toys - they’re a car; some Origami-style fiddling later, they’re a robot! - probably isn’t where that trend bottoms out. Michael Bay, the most bombastic, critically derided and commercially unsinkable director around, has as the title suggests gone prog rock for this third film, pumping up the Transformers “mythos”, and dragging it out to triple-album, 154-minute length.

Asghar Farhadi’s new film unostentatiously suggests that Iran has many of the same things we have: cars, cash machines, schools, sex, divorce, Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t, we gather, have modern law. Before howls of protest erupt over so banal and Western-slanted a generalisation, I stress that this is the film’s contention: the madness of law the film proposes is not necessarily fact.

Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected.

Denis Villeneuve’s impassioned, decorous adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s award-winning stage play sees a dead woman bequeath her children a mystery, which in turn unlocks the secrets of her past and ultimately theirs. The Oscar-nominated Incendies is an arresting and satisfying fusion of political thriller and family drama. Handsomely shot and mesmerising throughout, it’s a film told most memorably in the sensitive and resonant performances of its lead actresses.

If you have begun to tire of blokey-jokey films such as Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Hangover, then try this female-oriented movie that covers some of the same territory but from the distaff side. It’s well written and acted, and realistically portrays female friendships and how women really talk about men when they’re in all-female company - but most of all it is deliriously, side-splittingly, laugh-out-loud funny. Chick-flick it ain't.

Foodies will have a good laugh at Love's Kitchen, the British rom-com that casts Simon Callow as a bibulous restaurant critic and Gordon Ramsay as, well, himself. But cineastes are likely to chuckle, as well, at the filmmaking-by-numbers predictability of it all.

The adult craving for education isn't a well that film-makers visit often. Educating Rita gave Willy Russell his finest cinematic hour. Say what you like about Kate Winslet’s concentration camp guard in The Reader, but such was her love of a good book at least she learned to read. The First Grader, set in the dusty Kenyan outback, revisits the subject, but there all similarities stop.

It doesn’t augur well when the first comment you hear as the credits roll is, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.” That’s really not a great place to begin a review either, but let’s anyway. Or rather with a fnar, fnar moment - did nobody point out the other meaning of "beaver" to the film's makers?

As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers. Here's a movie that asks you to believe that the scarily thin Diaz can gorge out on junk food and retain her figure, that a teacher would steal from her student's parents (during Christmas dinner, no less), and that "dry fuck the fuck out of me" is the new "you had me at 'hello'". Not quite.

A potiche is a decorative vase but in this demeaning context it refers to a “trophy wife”. In this winsome French farce, from the reliably dynamic François Ozon, the “trophy” in question is the spousal equivalent of the World Cup: Catherine Deneuve.