In a rural village in Abkhazia (Georgia) where Estonian farmers had settled to tend a tangerine orchard, two farmers, Ivo and Margus, remain in the village in order to harvest the season’s crop of tangerines when a war breaks out. They get caught in the crossfire between two small bands of warring soldiers. Only two of the fighters survive: Ahmed (a Chechen mercenary on the Abkhazian side) and Niko (a Georgian volunteer). Both are badly wounded, but Ivo and Margus take them in and begin to nurse them back to health.

A heart-warming documentary.  In the early 1970s, Sixto Rodriguez was a Detroit folksinger who had a short-lived recording career with only two well-received but non-selling albums. Unknown to Rodriguez, his musical story continued in South Africa where he became a pop music icon and inspiration for generations. Long rumoured there to be dead by suicide, a few fans in the 1990s decided to seek out the truth of their hero’s fate. What follows is a bizarre story in which they found far more in their quest than they ever hoped.

A young peasant girl named Mui is hired to work for a well-to-do family in Saigon. Although the household’s fortunes change for the worse, Mui stays with them as a servant and grows infatuated with one of their friends, the handsome Khuyen. Years later, Mui is employed by Khuyen, who has become a renowned pianist. Although Khuyen has a girlfriend, he gradually begins to realise his own strong connection with Mui.  A modern fairy-tale of visual beauty set in 1940s Vietnam.

A science fiction comedy drama. Set in a dystopian near future, single people are arrested and transferred to The Hotel where they must find romantic partners in 45 days or be transformed into animals and sent off into the woods.  A desperate man escapes from The Hotel to The Woods where the Loners live. As strange as it is thrillingly ambitious.  Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman and Léa Seydoux.

Sometimes you have to reach into someone else’s world to find out what’s missing in your own.

The true story of a wealthy, physically-disabled risk taker, the picture of established French nobility, who lost his wife in an accident and whose world is turned upside down when he hires a young, good-humoured, black Muslim ex-con (Omar Sy) as his caretaker. The highest-grossing non-English language film worldwide.

Of all Hollywood heartbreakers, this must be one of the best.  Made at a time when Judy Garland was fast approaching final crack-up, the story of a young woman comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom, but achieves them only with the help of an alcoholic leading man whose best days are behind him (James Mason), seemed to touch exactly the right raw nerves in its performers to make them scintillating.  Garland’s tremulous emotion is harnessed to a story which is certainly worthy of it and James Mason gives a performance which is as good as any actor is ever allowed.

When the Oscar for Best Actress went to Grace Kelly instead of Garland, Groucho Marx called it “the biggest robbery since Brink’s“.