David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past.

There is ice at the heart of German director’s Dietrich Brueggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg). Winner of this year’s Berlinale Silver Bear for best script – the director wrote the film in collaboration with his sister Anna – it’s a chilling look into the psychology of extreme religion, in this case very traditional Catholicism, set in small town Germany. Formally impressive, it’s unsparing in its point of view in telling a tragic tale.

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.

An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety.

This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu), is a monumental film. Not merely in its scale – though at 196 minutes, it certainly clocks in on that front – but in its emotional heft.

It’s like one of the great Russian novels, and in his seventh feature Ceylan shows the influence of that country’s culture more strongly than ever (remember the direct references to Andrei Tarkovsky in the wintry Istanbul of Uzak, his first prize-winner at Cannes back in 2003?).

Clearly the makers of this delightful film from New Zealand have watched a lot of movies, as so many are neatly and obliquely referenced – Nosferatu, The Blair Witch Project, The Lost Boys, Grease, to name just a few - in a comic tale about a group of vampires in Wellington.

Fortune, as a rule, does not favour Part Threes. Hollywood history is replete with sequels that outstrip their predecessors, but second sequels have an altogether patchier track record – for every Return of the King, there are five Spider-Man 3s.

Taking inspiration from classic westerns even as it vigorously sets itself apart, The Homesman combines the taciturn and muscular with a feminist bent, and manages to be stirring and sweeping while also embracing the odd. It's a gorgeous, painfully sad tale of a man who's been nothing but a disappointment to himself and a woman constantly disappointed by others who, together, shepherd three lost souls on a desperately treacherous journey.

James Brown has always been on my Desert Island Discs list, because, should despair threaten, his brand of propulsive funk could be guaranteed to make the castaway "Get Up Offa That Thing". But despite a compelling performance from Chadwick Boseman that vividly captures Brown’s blend of charisma, drive, self-absorption and business savvy, the film is short on Brown’s most defining characteristic – vitality. The result is a missed opportunity that ends up being good enough when it should be galvanizing.

More frequently and accessibly than his fellow veteran directors of the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff has captured the pandemonium wrought by Nazism – in in his Palme d’Or-sharing masterpiece The Tin Drum (1979), its quasi-sequel The Ogre (1996), and The Ninth Day (2004). Though Diplomacy, his latest World War II drama, threatens an unimaginable Götterdämmerung that never came to pass – Hitler’s willed devastation of Paris and its population –  the tension it generates is undiluted.