History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.

You don’t tend to get many films from the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. And certainly not from Kyrgyzstan.

It’s perhaps best to start this review by stating that I miss Horrid Henry's target demographic by about, ooh, a decade or three. But it’s also right and proper to say that while I wouldn’t recommend it for grown-ups, those youngsters whose opinions I canvassed after the screening I attended gave it a huge thumbs-up.

Already shouldering the new Harry Potter off the top of the US box-office charts, this latest arrival from Marvel Studios harks back to a simpler America where the hero wraps himself in the stars and stripes and the bad guys speak with ridiculous German accents. It’s 1941, the Nazis are trampling Western civilisation underfoot, and gung-ho American kids are flocking to join up.

A Better Life is Bicycle Thieves remodelled for modern LA. Vittorio De Sica’s iconic 1948 film about an Italian father and son living over a precipice of poverty sadly requires adjustment only in its details, the theft of a bicycle the father needs to seek work here updated to a stolen truck.

What would loving Gilda Farrell be like? I do mean Gilda, and not Rita Hayworth, who was 27 when she portrayed her. The flamboyantly seductive persona Gilda has adopted to drive men crazy obscures the true nature of a woman who learns it brings out the worst in them and that it's a heavy burden to carry. As the actress ruefully remarked of her husbands, “They all married Gilda, but they woke up with me” - a telling putdown of the erotic artifice in which she herself was draped. 

One should never pass up an opportunity to revisit an Ealing comedy. Invariably arch, ingenious and wonderfully played, these dozen or so films made between 1947 and 1957 offer a lovely snapshot of a Britain long gone, while the films themselves still feel remarkably fresh. The Lavender Hill Mob isn’t quite there with the very best of them, but a digital restoration on its 60th anniversary is still irresistible.

There’s no denying that the French have a way with a thriller. Whether it’s the sleek noir of L’appartement, the corner-of-the-eye tension of 2006’s La tourneuse de pages or the altogether more brutal thrills of Cavayé’s recent Pour elle, there’s a quality to the films that sets them apart from even our finest English-language attempts.

Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.

The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the hip at CGI baddies, they are falling head over heels. So it is in Beginners, but with one or two eye-catching variants. Hal, just widowed after 44 years of marriage, now wishes to play the field. He’s 75. And as he informs his son Oliver, he is keen to give free rein to his long-repressed homosexuality.