“Only by doing something mad can I hope to stay sane,” says Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) to her lover, Alexander Nagler (Sam Claflin). “I feel it inside me, the same demon that’s haunted so many in my family.”

In a telling scene midway through Colette, our lead is told that rather than get used to marriage, it is “better to make marriage get used to you.” In this retelling of the remarkable Colette’s rise, it is evident she did much more than that; by the time she was done, all of Paris was moulded in her image, and in the hands of Ke

I don't usually suffer from chattering teeth and attacks of vertigo while watching a movie, but as this panorama of Himalayan disaster reached its climax I began to fear that I might need paramedics and an emergency evacuation. Everest might not top the all-time charts in terms of plot development or character psychology, but as an immersive account of a horrific chain of real-life events, it reaches – I nearly said "summits" – its objectives with distressing potency.

“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game.

Pretty in Pink featured an interesting example of female friendship between a teenager and a grown woman. A record shop owner imparts motherly advice to her employee while also getting to grips with her own identity. In a similar manner, Lynn Shelton’s indie comedy (which was written by YA author Andrea Siegel) pairs up Keira Knightley and Chloë Grace Moretz, but shifts the focus away from teen angst to tackle the quarter-life crisis from the point of view of a woman who decides she needs to find herself 10 years after graduating from high school

When Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to Megan (Keira Knightley) due to nothing more than an overwhelming desire to fit in with the rest of their group of friends, he starts a chain reaction which leads Megan to seek refuge with erudite teen Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz). Sent into a tailspin at the prospect of getting married, Megan tells Anthony she needs to take a week-long retreat but instead ends up crashing at Annika’s place and reaching back to her youth. Megan in turn finds a new friend in Annika’s father Craig (Sam Rockwell, pictured below), to whom she openly admits all her worst secrets.

Megan runs away from her close-knit group of friends who are all either settling happily into married life or on their way there and , though Siegel does poke fun at the conveyor belt marriage, she is surprisingly generous with her supporting characters. Knightley's energetic performance is entirely endearing; she bounces around in a beautifully shot wedding scene - which boasts the backdrop of Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle - like Lewis Carroll's Alice learning all manner of shocking new things.

Knightley shows off her comic chops as the cynical and neurotic Megan and she’s really rather funny. Siegel has written a witty, charming character for her to have some fun with and at the same time explore female arrested development. Likewise, Moretz is given a role that allows her to flourish. The two have great chemistry together. Rockwell brings his usual charismatic flair to his turn as a single father and chatty divorce lawyer. Previously, Shelton has directed from her own shorter scripts, in films such as Humpday and Your Sister's Sister, and left her actors to improvise. This marks the first time she has worked from someone else’s script and its traditional structure results in some loss of her usual naturalistic style yet still allows her to craft convincingly intimate moments.

Despite sticking close to formula, Say When makes a refreshing alternative to the man-child shtick of Adam Sandler. The simple gender role reversal and an eccentric lead performance which doesn't rely on cheap gags only further highlight the desperate need to shake things up. Shelton and Siegel make a great writer/director team who skilfully blend mainstream comedy appeal with genuine warmth and prove to be a positive addition to the romantic comedy genre.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Say When

Benedict Cumberbatch leads a superb cast in The Imitation Game, the highly-anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, gifted mathematician and father of modern computing.

Movies about the music industry often end up being bombastic or twee or merely idiotic. This one, written and directed by John Carney (who made 2006's not entirely dissimilar Once), picks its way carefully around the pitfalls to tell a story of love, loss and pop songs with sweetness and wit.

You wouldn't automatically visualise Keira Knightley as Indie Pop Girl, but she steps up winningly as Greta, a budding songwriter who prizes her music and doesn't want it prostituted on TV talent shows or bastardised to fit marketing strategies. She's in a seemingly idyllic (uh-oh) relationship with Dave - played by Maroon 5's frontman Adam Levine (pictured below right with Knightley) - who's also a budding songwriter, but one who's far more ambitious and career-minded. He has bagged himself a big-label deal and is whisked off to California, where the seductions of the rockbiz lifestyle swiftly drive a wedge between him and Greta.

Happily, back in New York, Greta has her buddy Steve to lean on. He's a schlubby, shambolic songwriter himself (a role comfortably filled by James Corden), and he arm-twists Greta into singing one of her songs at one of his club gigs. Her performance is nervous and hesitant and most of the crowd end up gossiping among themselves. Except one onlooker - it's dishevelled Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a label boss on the skids. He detects big potential in Greta's song, and in a whimsical but effective scene, he visualises musical instruments magically playing themselves to provide a full-scale arrangement.

The narrative evolves around Dan mentoring Greta through her debut album, which is done in guerrilla style by performing the songs at locations all over New York. With Steve as ad-hoc sound engineer and a handful of musicians in tow, they pop up on rooftops and alleyways, in subway stations and on the lake in Central Park (pictured below), cutting the tracks live. It's a hymn to the landscapes and characterful low-life of the city as much as an ode to free-spirited music-making done the old-fashioned way. The story of musical discovery is organically entwined with the themes of self-knowledge and personal growth, though you hope Carney would recoil in horror from such prescriptive terminology.The story makes a perfect vehicle for some sly jabs at the music industry. Dan has a habit of auditioning CDs sent in by musical wannabes while driving around town in his beat-up old Jaguar, and ends up chucking all the discs out of the window in disgust. Meanwhile he's drinking himself through a failing relationship with music journalist Miriam (Catherine Keener), and another failing relationship with the corporate label run by Saul, who's played by hip-hopper Mos Def (using the stage name Yasiin Bey) with comically deadpan cynicism. Saul can be relied on to prioritise a fast buck and a novelty hit over musical worth or an artist's long-term career, which makes him anathema to Dan. Another treasurable turn comes from Cee Lo Green as the outsized, blinged-up Troublegum, who generously repays Dan for the boost he gave to his own career.

Carney's message is be true to yourself, in life or in music. Dave's hopes of a reunion with Greta are seriously jeopardised when he plays her the hilariously over-produced tracks from his own album, while lo-fi tunesmithery guides Greta and Dan to the understanding that they're kindred spirits. Even though the plot comes unstuck once or twice and we could probably have managed without Dan's schematic teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), this is a truly lovable movie.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Begin Again