FIVE BEST FILMS

Down Terrace (15, Ben Wheatley, 89mins)
Ben Wheatley’s debut feature is low-key, observant and delights in character quirks, coming across like vintage-era Mike Leigh doing a gangster film, with a naturalism that feels closer to The Office than to crime drama. It’s the portrait of a Brighton-based family whose humdrum domesticity makes the Sopranos look positively imperial. Limited release

The Secret in Their Eyes (18, Juan Jose Campanella, 129mins)
The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film is a gripping police procedural and a rich meditation on love and memory, set in parallel timelines in the Argentina of 1974 and 2000. The event that sets the plot in motion is the rape and murder of a young schoolteacher. Twenty-five years later, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a legal investigator at the criminal court, is still haunted by the case and trying to write a novel about it. Nationwide

Leaving (15, Catherine Corsini, 86mins)
Kristin Scott Thomas’s tour-de-force performance, as a woman who abandons her bourgeois family life for a passionate love affair with an immigrant builder, gives what might otherwise seem an over-familiar melodrama real heft and emotional intensity. Limited release

Five Easy Pieces (15, Bob Rafelson, 98mins)
A BFI re-release of one of the key films of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, a thoughtful, complex movie that turned Jack Nicholson from counterculture icon into bona fide film star. He plays Bobby Dupea, a once-promising concert pianist returning to visit his dying father, having opted to drop out from his upper-class life in order to work the oilrigs of southern California. The screenplay, by Carole Eastman and the director, deals in subtle and insightful fashion with class, family ties and the burden of adult responsibility. Limited release

Toy Story 3 (U, Lee Unkrich, 108mins)
Its “U” certificate belies the fact that this is a heart-rending meditation on ageing, impermanence and mortality, yet it’s also a dizzyingly funny romp that honours and extends the glorious invention of the first two films. Scriptwriter Michael Arndt (who penned ‘Little Miss Sunshine’) gets full value from the old favourites, and hardly a sequence goes by without something that delights, or exhilarates, or amuses. Limited release