Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home.

One of the most refreshing aspects of current Latin American cinema, most evident in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, is a particular brand of off-beat romantic comedy – one with echoes of the literate and quirky US independents of the Eighties and Nineties, of Hartley, Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, but laced with melancholy and shards of realism that are specifically Latin.

Into the Abyss sees celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog take a sharp turn away from those marvels of early man he so magnificently captured in the stereoscopic Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the shocking violence of which humanity is also capable, here both greed-fuelled and state-sanctioned. It’s a documentary which takes as its focus a multiple homicide and is both an anatomy of a (triple) murder and a passionate, if frequently askew, petition against the death penalty.

The Olympics will be upon us all any minute now, but for the residents of East London they have been physically sprouting at the end of the road in the shape of a futuristic stadium for years. It takes the role of a shy walk-on in Wild Bill, a looming symbol of a local regeneration which was touted as integral to the hosting bid. It’s safe to say that the London seen here will not earn the grateful rubberstamp of the Cultural Olympiad. If you could get onto a podium for knifing, gashing, stabbing, thumping and thrashing, the characters we meet here could have been contenders.

There are many directors who profess (or have claimed for them) one sort of naturalistic cinema or another, from Ken Loach in the UK, to Bruno Dumont in France and Lisandro Alonso in Argentina. It’s an odd characteristic of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, that one feels almost discourteous to give them any such label. To do so would suggest at least some degree of artificiality, of self-conscious and discernible design; but when you watch a Dardenne film, there isn’t a single moment that doesn’t ring true.

Given the numerous and now pretty tiresome comparisons that pundits and punters alike have drawn between the Hunger Games trilogy and the inexorable Twilight saga, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine how the franchises’ respective heroines might get on if they actually met. One can’t imagine they’d see eye to eye on much.

If you’re the kind of person who appreciates auto-recommendations based on previous purchases, then perhaps I could do worse than begin this review by saying:” If you liked The September Issue, you’ll simply love Bill Cunningham New York.” There are obvious similarities: both are Cinema Verité-style documentary profiles centred around New York and fashion, both present a series of talking heads, and both feature the formidable Anna Wintour, managing editor of American Vogue.

Those of a certain age will remember the television series 21 Jump Street, a huge hit for the then fledgling Fox network in America. It ran from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp. The titular address was where he worked as an undercover cop, one of a team of youthful officers investigating crimes in high schools and colleges. Jonah Hill, who at 28 is far too young to have watched the original but no doubt caught one of its many reruns, is a fan and has now co-written, co-produced and stars in the film version.

The world has heard of Schindler’s Jews, who were saved from the gas ovens by the patronage of an enlightened German industrialist. Socha’s Jews are not quite so celebrated. There are number of reasons for that. For a start, many fewer Jews were saved in this narrative, and their story has not found its own Thomas Kenneally - nor until now its Steven Spielberg. But most importantly their saviour would never be mistaken for any sort of moral pin-up, being a burglar and black marketer who stashed his booty in the sewers of Lvov.

I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A.