Love is a many-splendored thing but it can also be a cruel mistress, as British auteur Peter Strickland so exquisitely illuminates in this startlingly beautiful Seventies-style European erotica, which centres around power and desire.The shifting nature of long-term relationships is explored through a lesbian couple with a fetish for butterflies and S&M.

Performed by a cast of ten actor-musicians, Derek Bond's take on Shakespeare's comedy of gender-reversal and the constancy (or not) of love is melodic, quirky and at its absolute best when it loses all sense of seriousness. It takes a while to get there given the Bard's finicky set-up, but Bond delights throughout in the characters' foibles and sense of rebellion and he fearlessly works the audience into the show - which, presumably, is as they like it.

Karen O’s first solo outing is an intimate confessional full of short, lo-fi, angst filled songs which mark a period in her life when she “wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again.” Recorded in private over 2006-2007 after a break-up with Spike Jonze the year previously,  the album leaves the listener to ponder not only her mind-set at that time but the reasoning for making this heartfelt debut available now.

Disney's latest is a film which must have itself represented a hell of a pitch. Based on a true story, it's basically Slumdog Millionaire meets Jerry Maguire - two films that attracted ample awards-interest and that prompted cascades of cash, like crunchy autumn leaves to be raked up by the sackful. Million Dollar Arm finds a hard-nosed sports agent travelling to India in search of the next baseball sensation, his method of selection - the titular talent contest.

The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath.

For a film that begins with the remark "this is the truth, sorry", The Fault in Our Stars could up its honesty quotient. Slickly made and very nicely acted within the confines allowed by the script, Josh Boone's adaptation of John Green's young-adult blockbuster novel nonetheless can't help but sell candour (not to mention plausibility) down a tear-laden river in its tale of young love cut short by cancer.

Sadly the battle to shape stories from a female perspective, or even to tell stories about women is far from over. The Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University recently found that women represented only 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013. If we look closer to home the most recent BFI statistics put the percentage of female directors working in the UK at just 8 percent (that's based on films released in the UK in 2012) - meaning this is even rarer than you'd think.

The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.

Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking.

"What's happening here?" Jennifer Connelly asks somewhere near the not-a-moment-too-soon ending of A New York Winter's Tale, a question filmgoers will have been muttering from pretty much the first frame. Not long after, Connelly lets rip with "this is crazy", a sentiment similarly likely to strike home with that hapless few who find themselves at this magical-realist foray into psychobabble and soap suds.