In keeping with his impressive body of work, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Steve James approaches the details of the life of film critic Roger Ebert with honesty and the utmost respect. James was granted unprecedented access to Ebert in the final stages of his life in December 2012, just after he had been admitted to hospital for a hip-bone fracture. Though James didn’t realise it at the time his celebration and documentation of the life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic also marked the last few months of Ebert's life.

Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.

“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game.

Rock music excessively rewards its pretty young corpses. Edwyn Collins’ survival, like Wilko Johnson’s, is much more remarkable. Two massive strokes in 2005, when he was only 44, should really have finished the ex-Orange Juice singer. Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film plunges us without preamble into the dramatised, subjective reality for Collins back then.

It’s fascinating to catch the moment when an already great film director moves onwards and upwards, to another level. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev has been collecting major festival prizes for more than a decade, since his debut feature The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003. After that he became a regular at Cannes, with his follow-ups The Banishment and Elena; his latest film, Leviathan, came away from the Croisette this year with the best script award. Many critics there felt that it merited something more.

Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high school

When Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan (Keira Knightley) due to nothing more than an overwhelming desire to fit in with the rest of their group of friends, he starts a chain reaction which leads Megan to seek refuge with erudite teen Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz). Sent into a tailspin at the prospect of getting married, Megan tells Anthony she needs to take a week-long retreat but instead ends up crashing at Annika’s place and reaching back to her youth. Megan in turn finds a new friend in Annika’s father Craig (Sam Rockwell, pictured below), to whom she openly admits all her worst secrets.

Megan runs away from her close-knit group of friends who are all either settling happily into married life or on their way there and , though Siegel does poke fun at the conveyor belt marriage, she is surprisingly generous with her supporting characters. Knightley's energetic performance is entirely endearing; she bounces around in a beautifully shot wedding scene - which boasts the backdrop of Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle - like Lewis Carroll's Alice learning all manner of shocking new things.

Knightley shows off her comic chops as the cynical and neurotic Megan and she’s really rather funny. Siegel has written a witty, charming character for her to have some fun with and at the same time explore female arrested development. Likewise, Moretz is given a role that allows her to flourish. The two have great chemistry together. Rockwell brings his usual charismatic flair to his turn as a single father and chatty divorce lawyer. Previously, Shelton has directed from her own shorter scripts, in films such as Humpday and Your Sister's Sister, and left her actors to improvise. This marks the first time she has worked from someone else’s script and its traditional structure results in some loss of her usual naturalistic style yet still allows her to craft convincingly intimate moments.

Despite sticking close to formula, Say When makes a refreshing alternative to the man-child shtick of Adam Sandler. The simple gender role reversal and an eccentric lead performance which doesn't rely on cheap gags only further highlight the desperate need to shake things up. Shelton and Siegel make a great writer/director team who skilfully blend mainstream comedy appeal with genuine warmth and prove to be a positive addition to the romantic comedy genre.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Say When

Space, the final frontier. Except that on the slowly dying earth where Christopher Nolan's often awesome sci-fi epic begins, the instinct to reach for the heavens has been crushed by the struggle for survival as crops die and life-choking dust storms sweep across the American midwest.

There's been much talk about Late Turner, to co-opt the name of the exhibition now on view at Tate Britain covering the last 16 years in the English artist JMW Turner's singular career. And as if perfectly timed to chime with those canvases in celluloid terms is Mr Turner, the ravishing film that stands as a testimonial to what one might call Late Leigh. The writer-director Mike Leigh has made period pieces before, most notably Topsy-Turvy in 1999, but even by his own exalted standards this cinematic profile of one artist by another stands a league apart.

And just as Topsy-Turvy was as much a depiction of the man behind the camera as it was about Gilbert and Sullivan, so too does a palpable affinity for Leigh's current subject course through every frame of this Cannes prize-winning film. Leigh has never made any excuses either for himself or his pioneering approach to work, and so it is here with his take on a maverick painter whose aesthetic brilliance co-existed with a social brutishness that is neither condemned nor sanitised during the course of an utterly enveloping two and a half hours; it just is.To that extent, one may be struck by the noises that accompany Timothy Spall's performance as the Covent Garden barber's son (Paul Jesson is a winning presence as Turner père) who went on to shape the way we think about art: Spall spends much of the time grunting and snorting his way through the day, allowing his gathering proto-impressionism to speak more volubly than he himself chooses to do. But one is never in doubt about the visionary grace that seems to take Turner over once a sketchbook or paintbrush come into play. For all Leigh's long-proven mastery of language, Mr Turner reminds us time and again that there are other ways of connecting to the world. Or not, as the case may be.

Indeed, this is hardly the first portrait of an artist as a dysfunctional family man - a jettisoned mistress (Ruth Sheen, another Leigh veteran) pitches up with her brood in tow. Alas, Turner's affections by that point have long since been given over first to an abject-seeming housekeeper (a rivetingly indrawn Dorothy Atkinson, pictured below with Spall) and ultimately to the widowed landlady, Sophia, who takes Turner in, this kind-hearted woman responding first to the man and only secondarily to the celebrated artist with whom she discovers she is sharing a house and then a bed. An open-faced Marion Bailey (Leigh's real-life partner) is a quiet sensation in this part, and one hopes amid all the deserved clamour afforded Spall, Leigh and inimitable cameraman Dick Pope that Bailey gets her due when prizes are doled out. 

The film places Turner in the social whirl of the age - his presence among the Royal Academy's politicking artistic fraternity is vividly caught - and in bustling, beady-eyed contemplation of nature, scene after scene subordinating the artist in pictorial terms to the vistas in front of him, or else capturing in filmic terms something of the heady investigation into the qualities of light that illuminate Turner's renown to this day. The film avoids the glib shorthand that often attends such ventures, and such connections as are made between his daily routine and his output go commendably unforced. There's a lovely sequence in which Turner absorbs a reminiscence from Sophia's then-living husband, Mr Booth (Karl Johnson), about his time aboard slave ships - from which encounter Turner's maritime classic T" (1840) was born. 

But exhilaratingly crisp though the film's look is, it never stoops to the merely pictorial, as if that choice would draw attention away from the inner drive and vigour that propel Turner ever onwards. Spall maps out each new chapter in the painter's art and life like some unsung pugilist forever trying to wrestle what he sees around him into an image that can be contained. And the fact that the painter is rarely if ever heard explaining either himself or his techniques seems in every way right. He's found a corresponding visionary in Leigh for whom empathy is the most majestic explanation there is.

View the trailer for Mr Turner overleaf

At least three composers have set about turning The Fall of the House of Usher into operas, including most famously Debussy, whose abortive attempt, completed by Robert Orledge, was brilliantly staged by Welsh National Opera in June. But there is a good argument that Poe’s story – short on incident and character, long on visual image and atmosphere – lends itself better to film than to the stage.

Adapted from the cult novel by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King) and directed by Alexandre Aja, Horns can't keep itself on an even tonal keel for more than a few minutes. Part policier, part doomed romance and part gothic nightmare, I suppose it might even have created its own nano-genre.