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One of the trickiest aspects of creating drama from a celebrated artist's life is finding an actor who can convey both the emotional life and the talent of that artist. It takes an accomplished actor to provide a convincing face to that artist and an excellent artist to convey the talent.

Fish Tank (out on 12 March) is one of those gritty working class, Brit flicks that makes few concessions to the demands of commercial cinema. Set in the grimy hinterlands of contemporary underclass England, it's a rite of passage drama about a bored and stroppy teenager Mia whose transition into adulthood begins when her mum brings a new man home to their grungy, high-rise flat.

As costume dramas go, The Last Station is perfunctory and it sags in the middle. Set in the last year of Leo Tolstoy's life, it dramatizes the battle between the author's wife Sofya and the leaders of the Tolstoyian movement that the writer founded, over the rights to his works.

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke's brand of filmmaking has been aptly described as “Hitchcock without the melodrama”. He also avoids neat conclusions, preferring ambiguity and the provocation of uncertainty so that his films clatter endlessly around your brain afterwards.

A highlight of last month's Vancouver International Film Festival was a potent little documentary called Burma VJ (http://burmavjmovie.com). The good news for those that missed it, is that it's showing again at the Amnesty International Film Festival this month (12-15, Vancity Theatre).

Adam (out on 14th August) is a romcom with a twist. It's a tale of a beautiful girl meets boy with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that is a mild form of autism.

In the 2004 feature documentary Scared-Sacred, activist filmmaker Velcrow Ripper went to what he called the “ground zeros' of the planet - post 9/11 New York, Bhopal, Hiroshima – in search of hope in humanity's darkest hours.

A preview of the closing film, Earth Days, at the Projecting Change Film Festival, Vancouver.

Laurent Cantet’s French language feature The Class (Entre Les Murs), opening this month, won the Palme d'Or, the top prize, at the Cannes Film Festival in the Summer.

The film, is based on teacher François Bégaudeau’s 2006 novel about his experiences, and stars the author himself as a maverick French-language teacher, François Marin, at a junior high school in a tough Paris neighbourhood. 

Israeli director Ari Folman, a draftee during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, wanted to tell a story about his wartime experiences. But he realised that “noone would want to watch a middle-aged man telling stories that happened 25 years ago without any archival footage to support them.” So he took the unusual step of making an animated documentary.