Director Bong Joon-ho watched Psycho as he prepared his latest film, one of the most discomfiting visions of mother-love since Norman Bates last ran a motel. There is Hitchcockian perversity, too, in Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja, an iconic Korean actress specialising in benign mothers, as a far more troubled maternal spirit. This nameless mother will do anything for her son, which feels like a threat as much as a promise, as Bong’s gothically atmospheric melodrama plays out.

Blame CGI. Blame Shrek and The Simpsons of Springfield. In fact, blame the general end of unknowingness and innocence in children’s entertainment. But they don’t make films like this any more. It has actual kids in it, rather than pixelated anthropomorphs, and they behave like actual kids too, just as kids in the days before irony and/or Hogwarts.

Blame CGI. Blame Shrek and The Simpsons of Springfield. In fact, blame the general end of unknowingness and innocence in children’s entertainment. But they don’t make films like this any more. It has actual kids in it, rather than pixelated anthropomorphs, and they behave like actual kids too, just as kids in the days before irony and/or Hogwarts.

Amid the cinematic dog days of late summer, François Ozon's Le Refuge comes aptly named: a character-led, intimate tale in the style of the late Eric Rohmer that will infuriate those who like their films more purely driven by plot even as it offers a refuge to moviegoers for whom the curves of a pregnant belly or a handsome young man's spine contain within them their own narrative.

With no Bonds or Bournes on the immediate horizon, no more Bauer with the end of 24, and the future of the Mission: Impossible series reportedly hanging in the balance, there appears to be an opening for a new secret agent franchise. It remains to be seen if Salt will plug the gap, though I for one will be more than happy if it does.

“You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” Bruce Willis asks Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger - an image any gay porn producer would triple the trio’s fees to see happen. It’s typical of a tone which teeters between knowing and not caring, in writer-director Stallone’s all-star homage to his Eighties action lunkhead prime.

Nobody can remember seeing a film about a piano tuner before. Happily, Pianomania isn’t merely unique; it’s a riveting documentary into the bargain. It takes as its subject the micro-detailed and nit-pickingly demanding routine of Stefan Knüpfer, Master Tuner for that Rolls-Royce of the piano industry, Steinway & Sons. Among Knüpfer’s celebrated clients are such titans of the keyboard as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner and Julius Drake, all of whom appear in the film’s 93-minute span. The main driver of the narrative is the ongoing account of how Knüpfer helps Pierre-Laurent Aimard to record Bach’s Art of Fugue.

This is one of those films it’s impossible to imagine being fashioned by an Anglo-Saxon sensibility. Part legal procedural, part autumnal romance, The Secrets in Their Eyes is an intriguing weave of tones and colours. It flirts at once with melodrama and slapstick while never finally deviating from a commitment to intense seriousness and emotional intelligence. No wonder it won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Five Easy Pieces is the nominal sibling to Easy Rider, which put Jack Nicholson a step from stardom in 1969. But Pieces, this 40th-anniversary reissue reminds you, was a very different film. The soundtrack is Patsy Cline, not Steppenwolf, and we first see Nicholson working in a hard hat, the music and garb of pro-‘Nam hippie-bashers in 1970. But the cultural action is mostly in Nicholson himself, and the simmering storm of dissatisfaction and high intelligence in his odd-angled, lean face, not often inclined here to split into that trademark super-smile.

I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds!

Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise, playing CIA super-agent Roy Miller, is so "real" that he can survive lethal assaults by swarms of assassins, plummet unscathed from high windows, swim underwater for miles and leap off flyovers onto speeding vehicles. Walking through gales of automatic-weapons fire, he suffers only a cut across his ribs.