Boy-meets-girl is the oldest story in the cinema, and yet this gem of a film shows that it can always be made to live again. Ernesto Contreras’s debut feature finds its own kind of heightened, dreamy realism, a kind that skirts the frontier of reverie and hallucination in one direction, and that of gloomy disillusion in another; but it is always rivetingly down to earth on the most down-to-earth of subjects: love, sex, loneliness and the dating game

This is a deeply strange and utterly hypnotic film, pointing to one conclusion: that Italy’s politicians have tainted the country with corruption and secret shame. Paolo Sorrentino, perhaps the most brilliant director of the new Italian wave, gives us a bird’s eye view of the grisly situation, a film about the inscrutable mandarin and postwar political survivor Giulio Andreotti: three times prime minister and Realpolitik specialist, leader of the notionally centrist Christian Democrat party and the silent spider at the centre of a vast conspiratorial web of shady deals.

In the way of so many Almodóvar films, Broken Embraces is built on a system of dual narrative with father/son and gay/straight opposites. Lluís Homar plays a blind screenwriter in present-day Madrid with the assumed name “Harry Caine”; while still sighted, he was once a distinguished movie director. The sheer, gorgeous style of Broken Embraces is what is so seductive - the director demonstrates a continuing, virtuoso fluency in a cinematic language that he himself invented - “It’s an embrace worth submitting to”.

This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel’s film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a place where shops and bus services have already vanished. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel’s camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.

An entertaining thriller from Spain, the latest of a batch of accomplished genre pieces from the region over the last few years. This is a variation on the locked-room idea, a scaled down version of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’. Four bright sparks - three mathematicians and an engineer - find themselves invited to a lonely house in an isolated part of the country; before they know it, they are locked in, and their invisible host is sending them intellectual brain-teasers by mobile phone. They have 60 seconds to get each one right; if they don’t, the walls are slowly forced inwards by a gigantic hydraulic press.