On-screen kissing rarely works; even the sexiest, most practised Hollywood couples usually can’t manage it. But when the eponymous Chico and Rita turn to each other against smoochy strains of “Besame Mucho” and their lips touch for the first time, it looks - and feels - like the real thing. Even though the couple were conceived with pencil on paper and born into a digital world, their kiss actually feels erotic.

Adrift (A Deriva), Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia’s third feature film, is a sensuous coming-of-age story as well as an ode to the Brazilian beach landscape of Buzios and the band of gorgeous bikini-clad teenagers who run wild in it. Although Dhalia says the film is not strictly autobiographical, he concedes that it partly mirrors his own childhood beach holidays near Recife and his parents’ divorce when he was 10.

Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt.

An English teacher in a brand-new Hertfordshire secondary school is about to lose his rag. “You said ‘relaxed, like,’” he storms at a boy. “Why like? Like what? Why do you use that expression? What does it mean?” This is 1962. It’s a scene from Our School, sponsored by the National Union of Teachers, one of four documentaries made between 1953 and 1964 by John Krish in the BFI’s Boom Britain: Documenting the Nation’s Life on Film, a project that celebrates the neglected heritage of the post-war documentary.

These days Gérard Depardieu looks as though he wouldn't need much padding to play Obélix again. Though he continues to work with some of the biggest names in French cinema, it has been a while since he really surprised us, maybe because he's now such a familiar presence; in 2010 alone, he took on no less than five leading roles and a couple of walk-ons.

Mike Leigh's Another Year traverses the four seasons beginning with spring, and yet the mood is autumnal throughout. People don't sunbathe or picnic or build bonfires or for the most part respond in any particular way to the passage of time. Instead, they nurse cups of tea, share (if they're lucky) in a cuddle, and bear out in varying ways the truth of a remark that gets voiced well into the film.

Todd Phillips’s interest in road trips as a hook for 90 minutes of male bad behaviour continues with this virtual remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. For mismatched couple Steve Martin and John Candy, read Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianakis. “I despise you on a cellular level,” Downey Jr tells the latter, whose boundless stupidity directly causes him to be banned from plane travel by Homeland Security, battered by a wheelchair-bound Iraq veteran, have his arm broken in a car crash, shot (twice) and arrested by Mexican border guards. You can’t blame him.

By the standards of contemporary horror movies, Let Me In has several things going for it. It isn't about somebody being tortured to death, its leading characters aren't played by the usual vapid twentysomething actors pretending to be high-school students, and, by and large, it eschews some of the more tedious horror fads of our time, such as herky-jerky editing, or big "Boo!" musical cues designed to make you jump.

Americans are chastised, often wrongly, for possessing a scant sense of irony, so I mean it as no criticism whatsoever of The Kids Are All Right to point out that the title of Lisa Cholodenko's wonderful film is altogether un-ironic. In less caring or careful hands, or a not so fully empathic context, this might be a portrait of irretrievably damaged youth with the parents deemed responsible, of the sort that proliferates on the London stage.

John Landis will always be loved for writing and directing An American Werewolf in London (1981), the definitive horror-comedy. That - and The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places - was reason enough for Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis to agree to star as 19th-century grave-robbers Burke and Hare in Landis’s first feature for 12 years.