Hailed in some quarters for its gruelling realism in the depiction of the work of the Paris-based Child Protection Unit (the French call it La Brigade de Protection des Mineurs), Polisse is another French cop drama but with tiresome pretensions of social concern plastered on top.

The wish to go back into your past, and change things with the knowledge you have in the present, must be a universal one. It’s the subject of Israeli-US director Dana Lustig’s A Thousand Kisses Deep, which manages to make fantasy come alive for its heroine Mia (Jodie Whittaker, outstanding in the role). With the help of time travel.

Nicely timed to coincide with London 2012, Fast Girls is a kind of athletic Bend It Like Beckham, although I doubt it will have that film's impact, either at the box office or on the careers of its stars. While the leads, playing a group of young female sprinters, are likeable and engaging, the film is a rather predictable story of overcoming hardship and conflict through sporting endeavour.

“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.

Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.

Comedic curio Casa de mi Padre features Will Ferrell in his most surprising role yet – that of a Mexican rancher who “no habla inglés”. This Spanish-language film is a tongue-in-cheek thriller featuring Ferrell alongside Mexican stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. It’s Acorn Antiques meets El Topo: frequently batty, wilfully inept and performed with aplomb by a sporting cast.

There was a strange sense of ghosts, or rather absent presences, in the screening room where I saw Ben Drew’s iLL Manors (that orthography reflects the chosen spelling of the film’s title, and Drew is also as well known as Plan B, from his rapper music career).

The world is awash with rock docs, most of them not very good, but it's best to think of Under African Skies as merely a superb piece of film-making. Marking the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon's Graceland, and included on DVD with the album's special reissue package, it's a gripping exploration of how Simon went to South Africa searching for fresh inspiration, made possibly the most memorable album of his career, but found himself embroiled in the poisonous politics of apartheid.

The Turin Horse begins with a prologue in which a novelistic male narrator, talking over a black screen, describes the probably apocryphal incident that caused Friedrich Nietzsche to suffer a terminal mental breakdown (the more likely reason being syphilis). In a Turin plaza on 3 January 1889, the German philosopher supposedly saw a horse being whipped by a coachman and, sobbing, threw his arms around its neck.

The main problem with making a prequel to Alien is that the 1979 original was so shockingly successful. Even now, countless generations of CGI and special effects later, Ridley Scott's unstoppable monstrosity is surely the most hideous intergalactic threat ever burned onto celluloid.