The season opens with a historical drama set in the last year of Tolstoy's life and turbulent marriage, when his rejection of his title and material wealth and his plan to bequeath his work and property to the public domain trigger an inheritance battle with his wife.

Nicolas Cage gives a brilliant and deranged performance as a corrupt cop in post-Katrina New Orleans, whose cocaine addiction and mounting debts tempt him to join forces with drug dealers. Herzog's manic melodrama is part black comedy, part pulp crime thriller and wholly gripping.

Christine travels to Lourdes on an organised tour, hoping for a miraculous cure for her MS and the pain and isolation it causes. This beautifully observed film is both a penetrating study of the spiritual tourism industry and a mystical inquiry, when what could be a miracle occurs.

This black comedy follows an incompetent Sheffield terrorist cell as they push their dreams of glory to breaking point by plotting a suicide bomb attack on London. Chris Morris's debut feature film uses humour as a weapon in an absurd yet utterly plausible terrorist farce – both hilarious and alarming.

When a mother discovers that her son, who suffers from learning difficulties, has been arrested for a young girl's murder, she obsessively sets out to track down the real killer and prove her son's innocence at all costs. An intelligent and unsentimental thriller from Korea that manages to be both tense and darkly comic.

A successful artist, weary of Parisian life and on the verge of divorce, returns to the country home of his childhood and strikes up an intimate and inspirational friendship with his gardener, a former schoolfriend. A beautifully crafted celebration of the pleasures and value of friendship and very French.

A period drama set in a German village beset by malicious and unexplained incidents on the eve of the First World War. Another absorbing, unsettling, expertly crafted drama from Michael Haneke (best known for Caché), which explores moral decline and the loss of innocence. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2009.

The Best Picture at the 2010 Oscars is an intense and affecting portrayal of elite soldiers with one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: disarming bombs in the heat of combat in Baghdad. A tense, fast-moving action movie focusing on the soldiers and their danger-freak sergeant, rather than the wider political issues.

A young Kurdish migrant reaches Calais, hoping to be reunited with his loved one in London. Determined to swim the Channel, he is supported by a world-weary swimming instructor, to achieve his dream. This engaging film focuses on the personal relationship between the men against a background of refugee persecution.

A famous conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, fired during the communist era for hiring Jews, decides 30 years later to perform in Paris with his former musicians, in place of the current Bolshoi Orchestra. Le Concert is a fast-moving beautifully shot comedy, a tale of passion bordering on obsession.

Almodovar returns with a beguiling story of a film director, caught up in a deadly love triangle, who loses both his sight and the love of his life in an accident. Improbable but intriguing, Broken Embraces weaves together diverse stories and viewpoints, past and present, into a complex, stylish and gripping melodrama.

Woody Allen returns to form with this little urban tale of absurdly neurotic New York relationships. A retired nuclear physicist and misanthrope represents Allen's alter ego and bitter mouthpiece, maintaining a remarkable lack of charm until he finds an unlikely companion in a runaway Southern belle. A classic of Jewish humour.

Two strangers from different worlds - a French Muslim father and a very English Christian mother from Guernsey – band together to search for their children in the chaotic aftermath of the 7th July London bombings. A heart-breaking drama of suspicion, prejudice and paranoia, beautifully acted and directed.

A French settler in West Africa desperately tries to save her family and her coffee plantation as racial conflict and violent civil war create chaos and terror. A beautiful and challenging study of colonial and family values, with a powerful and haunting performance by Isabelle Huppert as the “white material” of the title.

A deprived Mohawk reservation on the frozen St Lawrence River provides the context for this exciting low-budget thriller about immigrant trafficking. Two decent mothers, struggling in desperate situations, become cautiously trusting partners in crime, risking disaster on thin ice as they try to make quick money.

The winner of the 2009 Best Foreign Film Oscar merges a passionate love story with a crime thriller about a murderer who has escaped justice through a mix of police corruption and mysterious disappearance. The result is a lush, gripping and occasionally violent melodrama with a distinctive South American flavour.

An upbeat comedy about a football-mad postal worker whose dysfunctional home life is descending into chaos until he receives life coaching from his idol, the footballer-philosopher Eric Cantona. Ken Loach's socially conscious drama is leavened with wit, originality and fantasy.

In 1955, John Lennon was a troubled 15 year-old, torn between his prodigal mother, Julia, and Mimi, the buttoned-up aunt who raised him. As he escapes into a new life of rock 'n' roll, the truth about his past leads to a tragedy he will never escape. A moving coming-of-age drama which faithfully captures the spirit of the age.