As a capsule description of Pacific Rim, "giant monsters versus giant robots" will do nicely. It tells the fantastical story of mankind's battle for survival against a bunch of enormous killer reptiles from outer space, known manga-ishly as "Kaiju", which now live in a "dimensional rift" at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Although Blancanieves seems to come on the back of the world-conquering The Artist, it was actually conceived before the French tribute to silent-era cinema. Rather than being about silent cinema, Blancanieves is a silent Spanish take on Snow White which, through sheer panache, verve and eccentricity, can’t fail to seduce. But like The Artist, it has an unforgettable animal actor. It’s impossible to see a cockerel in the same way ever again.

The story you think you know slides beneath your feet in this rigorous investigation of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. “I’m a combative person," WikiLeaks’ founder says, setting out his motives. "I like crushing bastards.” Director Alex Gibney’s intentions are more nuanced. An Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side’s exposé of US abuses in Baghdad, he has similarly probed the poisonous roots of banking (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and the paedophile-protecting Catholic church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God).

It’s practically a pub game for overgrown children: factoring in the technical awesomeness, the solid virtues of the plot, the script’s adult-friendly appurtenances of irony and wit, what in your considered opinion is the best film in the Pixar backlist? It could be any one of the Toy Story trilogy, it could easily be The Incredibles, and there are those who would tick the box marked Monsters Inc.

If Mae West was once described as a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor, clad in gold and covered in real diamonds, is Hollywood’s ideal in Cleopatra (1963). Sumptuously restored to 2K DCPs and rereleased on the big screen, Taylor’s beauty and the chemistry with future husband Richard Burton remain throbbingly alive - in a production so mired and luckless that it tried to spend its way out of trouble.

What goes on in some homes would scare the sturdiest horse. Take Anna (Maria Hofstatter), whose daily routine might strike some serial killers as pathological. Semi-naked self-flagellation and circuiting the house on bleeding knees is the least of it. “Sexual wildness destroys”, a kitchen homily reminds a woman whose desires are buried in punishing Catholicism. But when paraplegic Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh, pictured below with Hofstatter) reappears demanding his conjugal rights, anyone’s faith would shake.

This movie has a couple of key advantages - it doesn't have any serial killers or zombies in it. It also pays the audience the compliment of assuming that it has a certain amount of intelligence, enough at least to appreciate being bamboozled by its relentless cleverness and convoluted trickery.

Sofia Coppola has become known for lovingly sketching out the tribulations of the rich and famous, and reviews of her 2010 Chateau Marmont-set angst fest Somewhere made it clear that critics’ patience with that particular seam had waned. But it has become easy to forget Coppola’s debut film in all this, because it doesn’t fit the pattern.

An English Civil War horror film which looks as if it was shot on authentic location in both space and time should convince his widest audience yet that Ben Wheatley is a major director. Released in cinemas, on TV, Video on Demand, DVD and Blu-ray on Friday, it’s yours if you want it.

There’s a whole genre’s worth of films that would be improved tenfold if they’d only focused on a different character, and it’s often possible to pinpoint a better candidate among the same film’s supporting cast. Zal Batmanglij’s undercover thriller The East focuses on Brit Marling as a former FBI agent who infiltrates an eco-anarchist group but (would you believe it) becomes sympathetic to their mission.