Octogenarian Cecil Gaines sits in a White House hallway waiting for a historic appointment in "Lee Daniels' The Butler."

A thriller of style and substance, “The East” follows an undercover security agent who infiltrates a cultlike collective of eco-vigilantes; the title comes from the name of the cell. Reversing our expectations, the tough, smart former FBI agent on the case is a woman, Sarah Moss (Brit Marling, who co-wrote the taut screenplay).

The Greatest Student Film Ever Made returns to screens in a brand new print personally remastered by the director. The story– if it could be described as such– concerns Henry, a lonely man who discovers that the girl he loves has carried and given birth to something that might or might not be a baby…

The Way Way Back opens with a scene set in an old wood-paneled Buick station wagon. (It will close in the same place, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Pam (Toni Collette) and her 14-year-old son, Duncan (Liam James), are travelling with Trent (Steve Carell) and his mid-teens daughter to spend the summer at Trent's beach house.

What does it feel like to be wrongly accused of being a paedophile? ‘It gets into your bones… it gets into your soul,’ Lord McAlpine said recently. In this nerve-shredding drama from Denmark, a good man’s life is ripped apart by false allegations that he sexually abused a child. He didn’t do it. The little girl fibbed (in the same way she might tell the teacher her best friend pulled her hair).

In French director Olivier Assayas’s semi-autobiographical Something in the Air (Après mai), idealistic young artist Gilles (Clément Métayer) shows the young woman he is pining for his latest work. She sullenly picks her favourite, which he promptly burns. No one but her will ever see it, he says morosely.

The distinction between life and art is one that all genuine works of art live to unmake, even if the circumstances in which we experience art have a way of maintaining the barrier. An art museum, for example, is designated as a place apart from the zones of ordinary existence. We enter to gaze upon beautiful artifacts at a safe distance, standing at the boundary between tedium and rapture.

The story told by Rama Burshtein in Fill The Void, her remarkable debut feature, has an almost classical simplicity. Shira (Hadas Yaron), a young woman living in an ultra-Orthodox enclave in Tel Aviv, faces a choice not unlike those faced by the heroines of Jane Austen novels and Hollywood romantic comedies. Which man will she marry?

Anyone who dismisses any hope of subtlety from Baz Luhrmann's audacious adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel will not only be pleasantly surprised, they're likely to reappraise the director's alleged preference for tack over tact. Yes, The Great Gatsby is brash, loud, over-the-top, in-your-face, raucous and outlandish - as it should be. But only for a while. And only when called for.

Shawney Cohen considers himself a filmmaker, but he's actually been a strip club manager for longer. When he was six years old his father bought “The Manor,” a small-town strip club attached to a seedy 32-room motel. Thirty years after the purchase, the family's extravagant lifestyle has got the better of this family.