‘A woman’s voice reveals her nakedness,’ scolds Wadjda’s teacher, as she and a friend run laughing from a Riyadh sidestreet into their school playground. ‘What if a man had heard you?’ Well, plenty of men will hear her now. Wadjda is the first film to have been entirely filmed within Saudi Arabia, by that country’s first female director, no less.

‘Don Jon” takes a smart, even-handed look at a provocative subject — porn — and measures its effect on the modern male psyche. The film marks the stellar writing and directing debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who proves to be a proficient talent in both arenas.

His West Bank hometown of Bil’in having turned into a site of provocative Israeli land development and weekly civil disobedience, Palestinian Emad Burnat, a family man, took to documenting the clash, beginning in 2005. Unwittingly, he started calling himself a journalist – isn’t that often how it happens?

French film Mood Indigo (L’Écume des jours) is like something out of a dream, with the same fantastically strange vibe as director Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a thousand times over.

The Attack opens with the image of a man and woman embracing, the world blurred behind them. Her face to the camera, the woman cries as they hold each other, but it’s unclear whether he can see her tears.

Entertainment stars blaze brightly and often burn out, like the celestial bodies above them. At least they get a chance to sparkle, if only for a while. But what of the unknown talents who just miss the brass ring? Their fate can be a peculiar mix of thwarted ambition and cult appreciation, of stardom beyond reach but still offering a warming glow.

In Andreas Pichler’s The Venice Syndrome, you can’t see the pigeons in Piazza San Marco for the tourists. The moment the first morning barge arrives, the cobblestone streets and Rialto bridge are thronged, not with the dwindling 58,000 residents but with an equal number of daily visitors (in 2012, 20 million tourists took in the sinking city’s sights).

No is a universal outcry against all kinds of repression, oppression and suppression of freedoms, religious extremism and sectarian sedition. It is presented through 19 sketches, connected by the general idea and separated by the events.

Energetic, outrageously camp and frequently funny, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film is a welcome throwback to the raucous comedies the director made in the 1980s.

Adore has been adapted by Christopher Hampton from Doris Lessing’s story ‘The Grandmothers’, which is said to be inspired by true events. In the film, Lil (Watts) and Roz (Wright) are lifelong, inseparable friends who each have a son: Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville), respectively.