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★★★☆☆ Julian Assange must have wept with joy when news broke about Edward Snowden's controversial Nsa security leak. Or perhaps he was green-eyed at how Snowden's disclosure truly characterised the poisoned chalice that the internet has become - as equally free and open as it is mass-monitored. Alex Gibney, veteran of the political doc, couldn't have picked a more opportune and red-hot topic for a documentary, as he reviews the history of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the diplomatic maelstrom that followed the website's many incendiary revelations. Sadly, We Steal Secrets (2013) is a film which gets lost in its data.

The first half pulls at many interesting strands, such as how the Us and other digital superpowers now rely on acne-blighted whiz-kids to perform the most complex of hacks, yet ultimately these are the same kids who can tear down political institutions with the click of a button. This constant double-edged sword,...

★★★★☆ Andrei Konchalovsky is one of cinema's true enigmas. Loosely descended from Tolstoy and born into tsarist nobility in 1937, he has the genetic make-up of a genius, and once displayed all the signs, but to look back upon his filmography is like staring at a jigsaw with all the wrong pieces. He has disassembled the Soviet psyche and collaborated with Andrei Tarkovsky over the years, but in Runaway Train (1986) there's a joyous lunacy unleashed at full force. It's also one of his most straightforward films, as convicts Oscar 'Manny' Manheim (Jon Voight) and Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) attempt a gutsy jailbreak.

Manheim has been sealed off in solitary for three months, before finally winning a court case which will allow him to re-enter the main prison. Of course, these three months have simply given him the time to plan his escape. McGeehy immediately becomes his faithful lapdog, ensorcelled by Manheim's wild rebelliousness,...

★★★★☆ Each year, the discourse on global oil production intensifies; critics have been vocal about its dirty, finite and dangerous properties, or its place in a capitalist society which is reliant on unremitting assembly. It would therefore be straightforward to apply these arguments to Anthony Wonke's documentary Fire in the Night (2013), a sensitive retelling of the explosion that occurred on 6 July, 1988 on the Piper Alpha platform. But Wonke's poetic and solicitous film, based on a book by Stephen McGinty, relives the tragedy in a deeply personal way, interviewing those who survived, and is actually richer for the absence of politics.

Located off the east coast of Aberdeen and owned by Occidental Petroleum, Piper Alpha provided 10% of all North Sea oil production and at the time was channelling 300,000 barrels of oil per day. In a tragic way, the sheer scale of the operation contributed to the rig's doom as two explosions,...

★★★★☆ Stephen Hawking's first wife, Jane, once explained that as the years passed and her husband made new discoveries, their relationship evolved two faces. The public image was that of Stephen travelling around from lecture to lecture, picking up science awards and honours all over the place. But internally, their home life was being damaged. Hawking's reluctance to be cared for by nurses, coupled with his determination to work and travel, started to suffocate the life out of their marriage. Now, Ben Bowie and Stephen Finnigan's enlightening documentary Hawking (2013) travels deep into the psyche of the revered British physicist.

Written by Hawking himself, the film uses photos and videos as well as reconstructed scenes to timeline his brilliant and boundless mind. Born to academic parents, Hawking quickly showed signs of a fierce intellect, constantly questioning how things worked - a trait that would continue through his Oxford years.

★★★★★ If there's one studio reboot that seems immune to criticism (and today, we're lumped with about ten per week) it's Japanese animation guru Hayao Miyazaki's heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988). Partially, its success is all in the timing. In the 1970s, animé was moulded for television, therefore slight, local and far from spectacular. Miyazaki took off in a different direction, angling for a new feature film audience and an international one at that - both of which he earned after exploding the commercial market with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika, 1984).

Set in rural Japan, 1958, Totoro follows two young girls, Mei and Satsuki, as they relocate to the country to be closer to their hospitalised mother (a throwback to Miyazaki's own childhood). Curiously, the girls encounter Totoro, a lovably owlish creature who leads them on fantastical adventures through the forest, providing...

★★★☆☆ After focusing predominantly on short film projects, director Pj Raval returns with only his second feature, Before You Know It (2013), a thoughtful documentary on growing old in the gay community. The film hooks between three elderly men in the Us - Dennis from Florida, Ty from New York and Robert from Texas - with Raval centring on their individual struggles to find acceptance, liberation and fun in their silver years. The director navigates well between the three men's lives to convey how their circumstances may be different, but they have all faced rejection from family or have witnessed friends die over the years.

Robert has the most upbeat attitude; running a bar which hosts bawdy burlesque and other entertainment, he feels that these are the years he should be enjoying. Ty lives in Harlem and helps run The Sage Centre (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders...

★★★☆☆ The mockumentary has steadily evolved over the last 30 years, borrowing here and there from the found footage and talking head formats that have opened doors to parody and satire. Recently, more emphasis has been placed on the actual filmmaker - how much can we trust them? Has the narrative been predetermined or simply edited together from hours of film? These questions are reintroduced by Morgan Matthews in his quasi-documentary Shooting Bigfoot (2013), which joins three groups of Sasquatch hunters across the southern States, cutting between the trio with near-perfect comic timing and narrative nous.

In one posse, Dallas and Wayne are like Batman and Robin past their best, pointing at pictures of previous 'sightings' and filled with stories of their youth when they'd apparently come into contact with Bigfoot. Wandering out into the forest, they screech, shout and plant traps for their prey, while squabbling and disagreeing over the most trivial of things.

★★☆☆☆ Missions, murders and conspiracies: the basic recipe for almost all of Seung-wan Ryoo's films. His ninth feature, The Berlin File (2013), borrows a similarly seething framework to Dachimawa Lee (2008), all about spies and the threat of North Korea. This is certainly timely given Western paranoia over a nuclear Pyongyang, but Ryoo's new piece is a failed attempt at disentangling the complex web of corruption and browbeating politics cooked up between the military and government. Plotting this film is basically folly, as it clings to the idea that the action sequences will be so mesmerising you won't need to know what's going on.

Pyo (Jung-woo Ha), a North Korean secret agent, is sent undercover to expose an illegal arms deal but is soon caught up in a North-South espionage nightmare, where traitors defect and then re-defect, cameras film other cameras and Pyo is left wondering who has betrayed him: his wife or his political overlords.

★★★☆☆ Perhaps it bodes well for awkward young men around the world if an undead Nicholas Hoult is able to form a relationship with a beautiful woman. Especially after killing her boyfriend and eating his brain. Such is the basis of Jonathan Levine's screwball horror Warm Bodies (2013), a modern 'zom-rom-com' to (potentially) kick-start a romantic sub-genre which portrays its hobbling protagonists with warmth and magnanimity. In a dystopian North America, surviving humans have walled themselves into a safe part of the city while the surrounding areas are roamed by pale-faced zombos constantly on the hunt for their next fleshy meal.

However, when 'R' (Hoult) stumbles into Julie (Teresa Palmer), something clicks; maybe it was his detached jaw hitting the floor or the final crunch of her boyfriend's cerebellum, but either way the pair have some kind of spark. Now R must protect his lovely Julie from his less articulate brethren,...

★★★☆☆ It's almost certainly a trait of British resilience, but we're fortunate enough to enjoy some of the most biting political satire in the world. Unsurprising really, as it speaks to the flustered Whitehall officials, the 'faces' of government, who stockpile bureaucracy and pose for the cameras. Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It perfectly lifted the curtain on political chaos: outwardly, well-advised speeches are made and events precisely coordinated, but flick all the lights on and our hapless leaders are trying to crowbar the D: drive open. Veep is The Thick of It's HBO cousin, Iannucci's foray into how equally clueless Us democrats are.

Just as we never see the Prime Minister in The Thick of It, we never see the President in Veep. Instead, we're privy to the inner-workings of Vice President Selina Meyer's (Julia Louise-Dreyfus) office and her four-handed team of ham-fisted staff: Chief of Staff Amy...

★★★★☆ However disposable our current trends are, there's still a desperate need to classify what digital culture means to us. Trolling, outrage on social media, hacktivism - is it just iconoclasm writ large across the web? Some argue that these actions represent the mutilation of community, the loss of social value, worth and privacy. If so, we haven't travelled far from a 1960s culture which wrestled with the emptiness of bourgeois living. So we revisit 1968: stumbling towards the end of a tumultuous decade which united the student population and liberated many attitudes towards sex, politics and money.

All across Italy (and indeed much of the West), undergraduates rioted against police, supported by the convictions of left-wing organisations. But Pier Paolo Pasolini, openly an anti-consumerist along with communist comrades, opposed the students, arguing that policemen were the real proletariat. The same year, Pasolini delivered his sixth feature film, Theorem (Teorema, 1968), which...

★★★★☆ Anyone even vaguely familiar with Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda will know of his astute ability to excavate the emotions at the core of family life. His tenth feature, I Wish (Kiseki, 2011), feels a lot like a follow-up to Nobody Knows (2004) in which he tells of a young boy who cares for his siblings after their mother apparently deserts them. Here, he casts real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda as Koichi and Ryunosuke who are split up after their parents separate. When Koichi overhears the plans for a new bullet train, he becomes convinced of the rumour that when the two trains pass each other, a raw bolt of energy will manifest and grant wishes.

The first act is very mindful and deliberate. Koichi ponders the significance of the erupted volcano that steals the horizon, asking why everyone is so calm when ash is falling from the sky. He quietly attends...

★★★☆☆ It's entirely appropriate that Tony Britten, an established and well-versed composer himself, delivers this spirited biopic about the life of Benjamin Britten (no relation). His idle feature film record is in plain view however, as the structure and format of Peace and Conflict (2013), his second feature, spoil the journey. He's adopted the quasi-documentary, splitting his film in two: one half, a fictionalised account with Alex Lawther turning in an engrossing performance as a young Britten during his Gresham's School days, the other a documentary with interviews, recitals and a distracting piece of narration by John Hurt.

The decision to intercut the narrative with voiceovers and archival photographs is occasionally enlightening but mostly lethargic. Sometimes the contrast between reality and fiction works well in biopics in order to unpick the material, but the narrative clout in Peace and Conflict is completely diluted by its documentary parentheses. It's possibly a matter of personal taste,...

★★★☆☆ The recycled storyline of outsiders invading close-knit communities, particular ones that are odd due to their remoteness, is espoused by Chris Chibnail for his eight-part ITV crime drama Broadchurch (out now on DVD). Set amongst the idyllic cliffs of the Jurassic Coast, the fundamental premise is that a beautiful landscape and its similarly faultless townsfolk are devastated by tragedy. To its credit, the series is instantly disquieting, as incoming Di Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and partner DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) discover the body of Danny Latimer, a local boy who has seemingly committed suicide.

When foul play is suspected in the Latimer case, a search ensues to find the boy's anonymous killer, pointing the finger at almost every character we encounter. The two detectives, played by Tennant and Colman, are the stars of the show. Miller is overlooked for promotion, much to her disbelief, and Hardy is shipped in...

★★☆☆☆ With second film The Oranges (2011), Julian Farino is still a far way off securing any form of distinctive directorial style, his latest a simplistic story of small-town outrage. Nina Ostroff (Leighton Meester) returns home and is quickly introduced to the Walling family's eligible son Toby (Adam Brody), but the neighbouring families are shocked to learn that she has her eyes on his father, David (Hugh Laurie). Cue heated arguments about the age gap and some misplaced moments of comedy. With modern cinema currently under siege from quirky rom-coms and offbeat dramedies, we're hardly in need of any new contributions.

And yet, The Oranges could easily have benefited from a greater injection of such aforementioned whimsy. In all likelihood, it's an American film which would have unravelled the peculiar dynamics of suburban scandal had Tim Burton or Wes Anderson been in the director's hot-seat. Instead, Farino struggles to elude the melodramatic...

★☆☆☆☆ It was perhaps foolish to think that Bait (2012) might recall the raw menace of Stephen Spielberg's Jaws (1975) or Joe Dante's B-movie classic Piranha (1978). But Kimble Rendall's toothless horror is nothing of anything really: an underwater travesty which takes itself far too seriously and comes nowhere close to making the slightest contribution to the genre. Rendall has presumably lured the cast from 90210 to star in his film as a group of air-headed teens and shoppers, from Xavier Samuel (The Twilight Saga) to Julian McMahon, find themselves trapped inside a supermarket following a devastating tsunami.

While the clean-up on aisle five gets underway, the hapless Ozzies soon realise they aren't alone - a great white shark isn't satisfied with the reduced-to-clear items and is on the prowl for some flesh. If the team behind the Scary Movie franchise made a Jaws spoof, this is what it would look like.