As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal.

Cinematic virtuoso Pedro Almodóvar’s contribution to the body horror subgenre is a sumptuous nightmare with the precision and looming malevolence of its psychotic surgeon’s blade. His 19th feature is a film for our age – an age which has seen radical and sometimes grotesque surgical reinvention - concerned as it is with the troubling question: what actually lies beneath?

You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.

Warning to hunky French jazz pianists: beware a slim, raven-haired Englishwoman who looks like Anne Hathaway but goes by the name of Emma and will up and leave you the second her long-standing chum, Dex, crosses la Manche to extend rather more than a main by way of welcome. Sound unfair?

The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.

It is easy to see why Danish director Susanne Bier’s latest movie would have scooped up all the Foreign Language gongs, made the festival selection lists and generally five-starred it all over the shop.

Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his brother Martin, who directed Gleeson in In Bruges.

The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams’ writers, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig similarly found the prospect of the sort of six-shooter/laser dust-up last seen when 1980s schoolkids tipped up their toy boxes irresistible.

This is ferocious popular cinema. The original Elite Squad (2007) was an iconic hit in Brazil, detailing the training, private lives and bloody ghetto raids of BOPE, the black-suited elite Rio police force led by charismatic Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura). Director José Padilha resisted offers to convert the film’s commercial clout into a TV franchise, instead expanding this sequel into a total indictment of Brazilian society. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is the most politically and socially engaged, best action film this year.

There are biopics and there are biopics. The process by which an actor is made up to look like the character he has been cast to play gets an intriguing twist in The Devil’s Double. Latif Yahia, who was often confused with Uday Hussein when they were at school, many years later found himself involuntarily drafted as the lookalike of Saddam’s son. And now both men are played by Dominic Cooper, who finds himself in the odd position of being made up to look like he's been made up to look like a lookalike.