Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to 2009 Sundance hit Humpday doesn’t immediately seem to share much common ground with its predecessor. Where that film could be summed up (albeit reductively) in a single attention-grabbing sentence – “Two straight male friends decide to have sex as an art project” – there is no unifying device in Your Sister’s Sister, which can best be described as a study of three people struggling to define what they need from one another.

Todd Solondz is the indie king of American dysfunction. But the director of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse has served a strange fish for his latest film, and that’s not just because of the awkward terrain of his subject matter. Veering confusingly between comic realism and the protagonist’s flights of fancy, Dark Horse is a film that falters and swerves in a whole mess of directions. It’s disorientating, and not in a good way, but rather in a clunky, abruptly shifting gears sort of way.

Some movies are defined by sounds and Killer Joe is most certainly one of them. The squeak of a stripper’s heel on a clear plastic floor, the crack of thunder, the thrum of a motorcycle engine and the thump of a bouquet of flowers landing on a coffin – which unquestionably spell sex, trouble and death. From director William Friedkin - still best known for The Exorcist and The French Connection, films he made some 40 years ago – Killer Joe is pure juicy pulp.

Although tinged throughout with blue, the Norwegian drama King of Devil’s Island is so grim it might as well be grey. Basing it on real events pitches the film as a cautionary tale, but the message is hard to determine. Everything shies away from explanation. Norwegians might have the context, but the rest of us need to fill in the gaps.

Can your BFF also be the father (or mother) of your child, not to mention the lover with whom you share both body and bed once all platonic constraints have been cast aside? It's in the DNA of the Hollywood romcom to contrive suspense out of so many foregone conclusions, and I doubt anyone watching Friends with Kids will be in any way surprised at the outcome. What filmgoers should respond to are the wisdom and wit that writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt gently imparts along the way to a finish that may make even the most child-phobic start to choke up.

Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.

Fully retitling a foreign-language film for international release is a risky business. But it works very well with Russian director Alexei Fedorchenko’s melancholic drama Silent Souls.

Stephen Frears is one of a trio of great old British lags who’ve been knocking out films for the past four decades. But while you know where you are with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, with their deadly serious careers as auteurs, Frears is a more elusive figure. A directorial pragmatist, he has always unfussily followed the scent of a good story.

Once again bringing to screen the seemingly unfilmable (see also Naked Lunch and Crash), the audacious David Cronenberg takes on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel - a novel which in the last decade has become frighteningly pertinent. Respectfully retaining much of DeLillo’s original dialogue, Cosmopolis is a paranoid, loquacious nightmare, a sly, searing study of the alienated super rich, a meditation on greed, emptiness and jealousy.

There's nothing wrong with the film adaptation of the stage show Rock of Ages that more raunch and noise - oops, I meant noize - might not put right, assuming that an amiably dopy immersion in Eighties rock pop is your thing. One of those star-a-minute movies ("Look, there's Mary J Blige!"; "Wait, isn't that Catherine Zeta-Jones?") that may well have been more fun to make than it is to see, the director Adam Shankman enters into the flat-out silliness of the enterprise without fully embracing the correspondingly anarchic spirit.