Imagine a special two-hour-plus resurrection of that wannabe extravaganza Stars in Their Eyes. "So, young maestro André de Ridder, who are you going to give us?" "Well, in addition to showing my special flair for contemporary music in Ligeti, I'm going to be Herbert von Karajan conducting On the Beautiful Blue Danube to a ballet of spacecraft." With another rigorously calibrated turn of the screw, it can only be the unique counterpoint of music, sounds, speech and silence with vision that is Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Tomorrow, When the War Began, Australia's highest-grossing movie of 2010, was written and directed by Stuart Beattie. It was adapted from John Marsden’s novel of the same name, the first in his seven-book Tomorrow series for teenagers, published 1993-1999. They tell the story of Ellie Linton and a group of her high-school friends who have to try to save their country from an invading militia after their hometown of Wirrawee has been taken over, their families taken prisoner and their homes destroyed.

If war is such hell, why do we keep doing it? This may be one of the questions you'll be asking yourself after sitting through the taut and gruelling 100 minutes of Armadillo, Janus Metz's remarkable account of a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan with soldiers of Denmark's Guard Hussars.

There are certain film-makers who like to give themselves a headache. Buried confined its only character to a coffin. Phone Booth stuck Colin Farrell in – what else? – a phone booth. Essential Killing imposes another kind of confinement on its main character: it maroons him in silence. It could be argued that cinema has long experience of keeping its mouth shut.

Matthew Bissonnette’s third feature Passenger Side is a mellow, honey-hued road movie which sees two discordant brothers combing the streets of Los Angeles with an initially mysterious purpose. A likeable diversion, for the most part it’s a nicely played two-hander depicting the rekindling of a sibling bond.

With his debut film, Moon, Duncan Jones demonstrated that a sci-fi movie doesn't have to depend for its success on fleets of warring spacecraft or flesh-eating alien monstrosities. He's done it again with Source Code, a cool and clever thriller in which futuristic anxiety and mind-bending scientific theory are firmly anchored in almost mundane reality.

This film tells an extraordinary - scarcely believable - story. Throughout the 20th century, the UK sent tens of thousands of children from care homes and orphanages to the colonies, later the Commonwealth. Parents were routinely told their children had been adopted by British families, while the children were told in many cases that their parents were dead. Children had been sent to the colonies since the 1600s but in the 20th century there was a formal nationwide policy organised by churches, local authorities and Dr Barnardo’s homes, which stopped only as recently as 1970.

Hollywood stars are well known for bragging they do all their own stunts, often at the expense of the genuine daredevils who risk their lives on their behalf. With the advent of CGI and motion-capture technology, though, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such an idle boast. What’s an icon to do to prove their mettle? The answer, it would seem, is to do all their own singing, even when they are patently ill-equipped to do so.