A Common Thread
Director Éléonore Faucher’s debut about a pregnant teenager Claire (Lola Naymark) who finds a job with a mourning seamstress Madame Melikian (Ariane Ascaride) brims with detailed fabric and detailed emotions. This is a quiet, beautiful and unsettling drama that balances some of life’s more difficult times.

Notre Musique
Jean-Luc Godard’s partially narrative, partially lyrical and wholly challenging three-part film takes a swipe at Middle East unrest with a poetic, suggestive journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, as the lauded French director sees it.
Opening with fictional and factual atrocities it moves to Sarajevo before examining, hazily if passionately, the Israeli/Palestinian troubles.

Mysterious Skin
In a rural Kansas town in the early 1980s, two eight-year-old boys experience a summer which shapes their lives forever. One is plagued by nosebleeds and blackouts that he says are due to his alien abduction while the other is sexually abused by their school coach. Played as teens by Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the two become friends, linked by their own endearing perversity.

The Take
Set in financially ruined Argentina, this small but important film makes a strong statement against the effects of globalisation by unapologetically showing a positive slant: we see how workers have breathed new life into factories abandoned by their owners.

Only Human
A light, nifty Spanish comedy that centres on a Jewish household into which one of the daughters brings a Palestinian partner. Comparisons to Almodovar are inevitable but this is much faster, more furious and completely addictive.