As a professional viola player, writer-director Denis Dercourt has a rare insight into the musician's psyche. Consequently, The Page Turner, his account of Deborah Franois's steely determination to exact her revenge on Catherine Frot - the self-absorbed pianist whose lack of interest at an audition destroyed her hopes of becoming a teenage prodigy - has a chilling aura of authenticity. But it's the mischievous manner with which he sets up his scenario and then manipulates audience expectation that makes this meticulously modulated thriller so darkly satisfying.

As ever, Frot excels as the emotionally fragile prima donna who comes to depend on her nemesis, while remaining totally oblivious to the malevolent web being woven around her family. Franois also impresses, as the cool blonde whose impassivity masks a fearful loathing. Yet this is very much a director's film, whose echoes of Theorem and Harry, He's Here to Help are unmissable. However, it's the Hitchcockian variations that strike the most ominous chords.

Unfortunately, the homage doesn't quite ring as true in Bad Spelling. Yet, while lacking the subversive edge of Jean Vigo's classic Zro de Conduite (1933), Jean-Jacques Zilbermann's rites-of-passage drama still captures the fobidding atmosphere of a rundown boarding school in the late 1960s and the torments endured by the podgily hirsute son of its disciplinarian head and his humourless wife.

Teenager Damien Jouillerot persuasively passes from anguish to rebellion as parents Olivier Gourmet and Carole Bouquet expel his Jewish friend Raphael Goldman after a trumped-up sex scandal. But his entrepreneurial liaison with bad boy Franc Bruneau is less convincing, even though their playground contraband store proves vital to the inevitable showdown. Zilbermann tells his tale well enough. But there never seems to be very much going on beneath the grey suburban surfaces.

Clumsily structured around chapters entitled Heaven, Earth and Hell, Australian Neil Armfield's Candy suffers from a similar problem. This daunting study of ruinous addiction is based on co-scenarist Luke Davies's semi- autobiographical novel and features powerful performances from Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger, as the artist and poet whose dependence on heroin destroys their own relationship and corrodes the lives of those around them. Indeed, their recreation of the junkie's highs and lows is disconcertingly credible. But, like Geoffrey Rush as their professorial supplier, they're always masterclassing rather than inhabiting their characters. Thus, while it's easy to admire their intensity, it's only possible to believe in the angry concern of Cornish's parents, Tony Martin and Noni Hazlehurst.

There isn't a single believable character in Ed Blum's Scenes of a Sexual Nature. However, this low-budget British comedy of amorous manners (it cost less than £500,000 to make) flits along amiably enough. Set on Hampstead Heath on a sunny afternoon, it's a free-wheeling series of vignettes dealing with love, lust and lasting relationships. Yet, as is often the case with this format, it's something of a mixed bag.

Andrew Lincoln's humiliation by wife Holly Aird for ogling a French sunbather beggars belief, while Ewan McGregor's discussion of kids and commitment with gay partner Douglas Hodge only has stunt casting on its side. However, the by-play between blind daters Hugh Bonneville and Gina McKee, the newly divorced Adrian Lester and Catherine Tate, and the freshly dumped Sophie Okonedo and opportunistic slacker Tom Hardy is frequently as amusing as Eileen Atkins's encounter with long-lost beau Benjamin Whitrow is touchingly sweet.