Having a strong company style is usually no bad thing, especially if – as with San Francisco Ballet – the main component of it is a commitment to excellence. It has been impressive watching the gritty energy with which, night after night, the American visitors to Paris dish up meaty triple bills (most pieces coming in at 35 minutes or longer) and serve them with éclat. Polish and professionalism like this help dancers keep going through a gruelling tour, and ensure audiences go away happy. But you can have too much of a good thing.

In 2005, San Francisco Ballet were the first company to visit Paris as part of a new summer dance festival, Les Étés de la Danse. Helped not only by this auspicious start, but by the obvious demand for live dance in a month traditionally barren for the Parisian performing arts, the festival prospered, and in this its 10th year, has brought the Americans back with a stonking programme. Every night of the 17-date run at the Théâtre du Châtelet features a different triple bill, covering in total 18 pieces by twelve choreographers – and that’s not counting the opening gala.

A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems on the cards. A feel-good scene of grumpy, grieving Matthew joining in at Pauline’s dance class also prepares you for a lazy, age-gap romcom.

Much has been said before about these two Leos Carax greats, but the beauty of these surrealist French films is that you can enjoy them again and again, each time finding something new to appreciate. It's been a while since Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang (The Night Is Young) were first released, but that only makes them that little bit more iconic.

A pervading sense of melancholia runs through this film, and yet it is neither chilling, nor disaffecting. Akin to one of the key characters, watching it is a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The Past hovers somewhere between fight and flight, with characters in myriad sliding door moments. They dissect the past and analyse the future, but are stuck in an impossible limbo between the two.

Alarm bells jangle when the first thing you see on the screen is a caption saying "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia". It's the sum of all cliches, and therefore the perfect way to tee off this incoherent pseudo-thriller from director McG which can't decide whether it wants to laugh or cry. The viewer may not share its indecision.

For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work.

This low-budget Parisian dramedy about doctor-patient relations is as odd, timid and well-intentioned as its socially maladjusted protagonists. Miss and the Doctors is writer-director Axelle Ropert's second feature after 2009's The Wolberg Family.

It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance.

An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances.