Denzel Washington steps into the shoes of avenger Edward Woodward (TV series 1985-89) as a quiet, private man wrestling with his demons as he tries to stifle his natural gifts for violent justice. He’s reluctant to hurt people but, you know, he has skillz. Washington's easy grace and intelligence give this predictable policier manqué almost edible allure.

Sometimes a film has you swooning from the very first frame, and Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's fifth narrative feature is one such film. The story of a nun's self-discovery is captured in delicate monochrome by cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski (Margaret) and Lukasz Zal, who render the often austere surroundings with great, gob-stopping imagination in a film whose beauty is enough to make you bow down and praise Jesus, whatever your religious proclivities.

An ageing misanthrope is given a new lease of life and a fresh outlook by a pretty, young woman. Woody Allen wheels out this tired old trope for his 44th feature film set in his favourite era on the French Riviera with a light romantic yarn between Colin Firth and Emma Stone playing out as predictably as one might imagine. Thankfully this old fashioned unravelling mystery proves to be a far more enticing affair than anticipated due to the striking backdrop of glitzy 1920s fashion, sparkling evening soirees and expertly curated jazz accompaniment.

This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.

Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law is back in British cinemas 28 years after it joined Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in galvanising the embryonic American indie movement.

Other films have been and still will be released featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman, since his death earlier this year. But A Most Wanted Man is the one that serves as the final testament to what’s been lost. Here is not just a final great performance, but a character one might otherwise have imagined revisiting.

That character is Gunter Bachman, created by John Le Carré in his 2008 spy novel, who compares with George Smiley as a skilled and honourable spy, swimming against the tide of more treacherous peers.

Buried deep in the final credits for theatre director Matthew Warchus's second feature film, Pride, is a shout-out to his late father for teaching his son the twin virtues of compassion and comedy. Both those qualities, as it happens, are on abundant display in this buoyant venture from Warchus fils which works on multiple levels, all of them richly engaging.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?

The frozen north of Norway seems an unlikely spot for a Serbian drug gang to be operating alongside a local mob, but this is the world which snow-plough driver Nils meets head on when avenging the death of his son. Throw in larger-than-life characters, cartoonish but very strong violence and a beautiful snowy backdrop and the result is the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, a revenge drama which doles out its thrills at a pace in total contrast to the bleak serenity of the landscape which defines this part of the world.

Ever since his 1967 breakthrough film Titticut Follies, an unsparing look at a Massachusetts prison for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman has been turning his dispassionate observational camera on the workings of institutions ranging from the US Marines to high school, juvenile court, and the American Ballet Theater. His latest, At Berkeley, is an in-depth exploration of the University of California’s San Francisco Bay Area outpost (UC is made up of several self-contained component universities distributed across the state, with Berkeley the jewel in the crown).