A petulant young boy is given a life-changing opportunity in this passable music drama. Newcomer Garrett Wareing plays an 11-year-old troublemaker gifted with an angelic singing voice, who winds up at America’s National Boychoir Academy after his mother dies. The Academy functions as a prestigious boarding school for talented singers, and it’s there that Wareing comes into conflict with both the pupils and the teaching staff, including Dustin Hoffman, the school’s hard-to-please conductor.

From here, the story veers between familiar and predictable, as we follow a disadvantaged youngster who is trying to earn respect from the people around him. Nevertheless, the singing is beautiful and the performances are solid, with Hoffman gaining quality support from the likes of Kathy Bates and Eddie Izzard. If you’re looking for a harmless crowd-pleaser, this will fit the bill.

There is just one week until Kate Mercer’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary and the planning for the party is going well. But then a letter arrives for her husband. The body of his first love has been discovered, frozen and preserved in the icy glaciers of the Swiss Alps. By the time the party is upon them, five days later, there may not be a marriage left to celebrate.

The news sends shock waves through his long marriage to another woman (Charlotte Rampling), and in the week leading up to their 45th wedding anniversary, she begins to wonder who he really is. Directed by Andrew Haigh (Weekend), this sober British drama showcases Rampling in a superb performance. Fearful, confused, and ultimately devastated, her character comes to learn that while a marriage can be strengthened by the years, so can the secret that finally takes it down.

From acclaimed director Pawel Pawlikowski comes IDA, a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers a dark family secret dating from the terrible years of the Nazi occupation. 18-year old Anna , a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, is preparing to become a nun when the Mother Superior insists she first visit her sole living relative. Naïve, innocent Anna soon finds herself in the presence of her aunt Wanda , a worldly and cynical Communist Party insider, who shocks her with the declaration that her real name is Ida and her Jewish parents were murdered during the Nazi occupation. This revelation triggers a heart-wrenching journey into the countryside, to the family house and into the secrets of the repressed past, evoking the haunting legacy of the Holocaust and the realities of postwar Communism. In this beautifully directed film, Pawlikowski returns to his native Poland for the first time in his career to confront some of the more contentious issues in the history of his birthplace.

Powerfully written and eloquently shot, IDA is a masterly evocation of a time, a dilemma, and a defining historical moment; IDA is also personal, intimate, and human. The weight of history is everywhere, but the scale falls within the scope of a young woman learning about the secrets of her own past. This intersection of the personal with momentous historic events makes for what is surely one of the most powerful and affecting films of the year