You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical.

Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art. In Juergen Teller’s case there is an emotional warmth that is particularly engaging, meaning the art world’s embrace is free of the occasional smugness that comes with its acceptance of the success in the “real” world of someone like Mario Testino. Teller makes everything highly personal, and we respond subliminally to his attachment to whatever he is photographing.

"There's a lot of nudity in The Sessions." That's what people will be thinking - and maybe fearing while also being curious - when they consider seeing this uplifting drama. 'Do I really want to see a naked sex surrogate have naked sessions with a naked journalist crippled with polio? Isn't this going to be maudlin, or perhaps worse, Oscar-drama territory?' After all, the film won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and we all know how 'out there' that could be.

There are very few examples in film history of a son directing his mother, and there’s a distractingly Oedipal vibe at the core of Barnarby Southcombe’s I, Anna that might offer some clue as to why. Charlotte Rampling turns in a brittle, enigmatic performance in her son’s big-screen debut, playing the eponymous divorcee whose attempt to become sexually bold goes violently awry.

At 23, Xavier Dolan may not be the new Jean-Luc Godard, but he could be the new Léos Carax. And Laurence Anyways – a tempestuous romantic melodrama spanning the entire 1990s – could be his Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. The third feature made by the Québécois enfant terrible dazzlingly demonstrates his prodigious talent as a metteur-en-scène and director of actors, though, at 168 minutes, it’s about 45 too long.

In Magic Mike the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh turns his camera on the “cock-rocking kings of Tampa”, and the result is one of the most eye-wateringly entertaining and surprisingly stylish movies of the year. With more thrust than a jumbo jet and more packages than the Royal Mail will handle this Christmas, thank God they didn’t release it in 3D.

Entirely in keeping with the heightened narrative surrounding pop stars and their perpetual crises, Christina Aguilera’s recent history has been spun into the kind of tragedy worthy of Piaf or Callas. Her last album, Bionic, singularly failed to shift anywhere near the kind of numbers pop divas need to keep a hand on the crown; she had the temerity to put on a few pounds and – worse – seem pretty relaxed about it; she got divorced; she got drunk. Ravens were seen leaving the Tower.

With her jewel-blue eyes and intense presence, Emily Blunt can illuminate anything – a screen, a stage, a red carpet, any location for any old interview. She might seem unable to put a foot wrong. With five film credits in 2011 alone (including the DVD under review) and two this year, she’s one of the UK’s most bankable stars, and presumably has a lot of say in exactly what should and should not do.

Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows.

Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead.