It may not be Scorsese and De Niro, but the partnership between Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan has been extremely fruitful. It has given us Coogan’s sublime portrayal of legendary music promoter Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, a triple role as that great literary waffler Tristram Shandy, Tristram’s dad, and as himself playing them in the dazzlingly post-modern A Cock and Bull Story, and again as the worst public image of himself in the television series The Trip.

The only faintly cracked note in this zinging early-season blockbuster is that, just as spring belatedly puts in an appearance, the action is set around Christmas time, with snow, Christmas trees and even some Yuletide hip-hop beats. Still, think of it as just a further example of the smart counter-intuitiveness that director Shane Black (stepping in for Jon Favreau) has brought to the party, helping to make it the fizziest and funniest of the series so far.

I’ve always thought of Lynn Shelton as Sundance royalty. Her breakthrough film Humpday – the über-buddy movie with the amateur porn twist – screened at the festival, as did her follow-up, Your Sister’s Sister, which demonstrated that Shelton could handle more mainstream comedy-drama without losing her indie spontaneity.

Unburdened by conventional narrative sense, Upstream Color is a true curiosity. Seductively strange, woozily kinetic and above all romantic, Shane Carruth's second feature is a little film with big, bizarre ideas. Incorporating pig farming, scientific experimentation and sound recording, it proves that you don't need a sizeable production budget to swoop and soar on the big screen, and that you don't always need to know precisely what's going on to be immersed in a story.

"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie Nugent. The format of the film is recognisable from countless documentaries: talking heads giving us the lowdown on a crime.

Promised Land is much better than its poster suggests. Winning Special Mention at its premiere at this year's Berlinale, this message movie takes on some extremely sensitive topics with a gentle determination and a relatively unblinking eye: the demise of the independent farmer, waning economics and the controversial concept of fracking – drilling deep into shale to inject high pressure fluid to free natural gas within the rock – that slots very nicely into desperate rural areas that are flailing (and failing) to survive.

Following in the footsteps of hugely popular television dramas and film adaptations of various Scandi noir novels comes this overwhelmingly sympathetic piece, a romcom that hasn't an ounce of gloopiness and, unusually, is about middle-aged people getting it together.

South Korea begging Washington for protection as the dread threat of nuclear apocalypse looms? As Graham Norton recently twitquipped, the news headlines are no more than the publicity campaign for Olympus Has Fallen. Most amusing etc, but that was before a bomb on an American street killed three and injured many others.

Down in the cellar where the monsters were in Sam Raimi’s 1982 debut The Evil Dead, you glimpsed a poster for Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, ripped symbolically in half. The bar for gruelling low-budget horror, Raimi was saying, had just been raised.

The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.