DAVID PARKINSON on current festivals celebrating Thai, French and German cinema

Such is society's insatiable appetite for novelty that the search is always on for 'the next big thing'. In recent years, the Austrian, Korean and Argentinian film industries have all been touted as the ones to watch. Now it's the turn of Thai cinema to be awarded a festival, at the Prince Charles Cinema, off Leicester Square.

The driving force of Thailand's emergence on the world stage is Nonzee Nimibutr, whose mafia melodrama Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters and his adaptation of the once-scandalous novel Jan Dara are both on display. Nimibutr also contributes to Three, a supernatural triptych in which his vengeful puppet saga is easily outshone by Korean Ji Woon Kim's study of murderous amnesia and a chilling tale of obsession from Hong Kong's Peter Chan. Further excursions into the unknown are undertaken in Anukul Jarotok's The Hotel and Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam's Bangkok Haunted.

The sinister side of the tourist paradise is exposed in Kaprice Kea's Butterfly Man, as British backpacker Stuart Laing uncovers human trafficking after falling for masseuse Napakpapha Nakprasitte. The film's motive is laudable enough and Kea's visual sense is fine, but the wealth of clich and caricature is only compounded by Laing's lumpen performance. More impressive are Keng-Jira Maikul's Mehkong Full Moon Party and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Monrak Transistor. Produced by the team behind the delightful comedy, The Iron Ladies, Mekhong Full Moon Party examines the difficulty of sustaining tradition in the face of modern expectation. It is beautifully photographed and subtly contentious in its take on Buddhism, tourism and media scepticism, and its final sequence ranks among the most elating of recent times.

Filled with the music of long-lamented pop singer Surapol Sombatcharoen, Monrak Transistor is a charming tale of misadventure and star-crossed love that delights in its kitsch, without lapsing into the high camp that undermined last year's Tears of the Black Tiger. As the wannabe singer with a genius for ruinous accidents Suppakorn Kitsuwan curiously recalls Norman Wisdom. But a little more emphasis on Siriyakorn Pukkavesa, as his abandoned, but unswervingly loyal wife, wouldn't have gone amiss.

The 5th German Film Festival runs for a fortnight at The Other Cinema in Rupert Street. Had it been held in New York, it would have been over-run by the movie nerds of Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijack's jaw-dropping Cinemania. These people build their lives around movies -- to the extent they timetable screenings months in advance and avoid foods that might require them to take loo breaks during Q&A sessions. The Viennese pensioners depicted in Bellaria -- As Long As We Live!, are more restrained in their passion for the films of UFA's golden age -- but only just.

It's been a while since Doris D-rrie forged her reputation with Men (1985). But she's back on sex comic form with Nackt (Naked), an insight into class and gender that follows three bourgeois couples as they anticipate, endure and recover from a nerve-racking dinner party. The film brims with knowing performances. Yet there's nothing to match Katarina Schttler's extraordinary display as a self-destructive pregnant twentysomething careering round Hamburg in Michael Hoffman's Sophiiiie!. It simply redefines the term tour de force, most notably during her bravura confrontation with a bar full of macho bulletheads and her despairing phone conversation with a total stranger as she cuddles her miscarried foetus. But there are calmer, even gently comic moments, too, such as the unexpected rapport she strikes up with immigrant taxi driver Erean Durmaz and the manner in which she runs out on cocksure boyfriend, Alexander Beyer, to the amusement of a watching waiter. It's just a shame that Hoffman loses the plot in the final act.

Among the other highlights are Iain Dilthey's small-town character study The Longing, Katalin G-dr-s's road movie Mutants, Peter Sehr's hustler drama Love the Hard Way and Ben Verbong's The Slurb, which is the kind of kidpic Hollywood has long since ceased to make.

At the Cin Lumire in South Kensington, the 12th French Film Festival presents a mix of fact and fiction, classic and contemporary. The multicultural nature of French society (and its attendant tensions) is a recurring theme. Algerian wife Fejria Deliba follows her work-away husband to a drab industrial town in Yamina Benguigui's autobiographical Inch'Allah Sunday, while a holidaying ten-year-old receives guitar lessons from a Manouche Gypsy virtuoso in Swing, the latest tribute to Romany culture from the inimitable Tony Gatliff. The agony of self-discovery is also the subject of Agnes Obadia and Jean-Julien Chervier's Hair Under the Roses, an adolescent angst farce that takes a refreshingly adult approach to sexual curiosity. But with such an ambitious programme, there's bound to be the odd misfire. Romain Goupil's Le Pure Coincidence, about a Parisian quartet's bid to expose a supposed white slavery operation, has its moments. But Christophe Honor's 17 Times Ccile Clossard is a sluggish, self-regarding treatise on bereavement, with Batrice Dalle struggling to convince as the runaway mother trying to rebuild her life with gay drifter, Romain Duris.

Finally, admirers of Amlie will be drawn to Pascale Bailly's culture clash comedy God Is Great, I Am Not, in which Audrey Tatou plays a model with a calamitous love life and muddled approach to religion, who throws herself into Judaism in a bid to ingratiate herself with middle-aged vet, Edouard Baer.

She delves ever more deeply into the darker side of her gamine persona in Laetitia Colombani's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which is currently on general release. All seems sweetness and light, as her struggling artist revels in her passion for married doctor Samuel Le Bihan. But an unexpected rewind midway through proceedings exposes the true nature of the relationship. It's a grandstanding gimmick. But the debuting director's attention to plot and performance detail ensures it achieves maximum impact.

Franois Ozon's 8 Women is showing at the Phoenix. A murder mystery set in a remote 1950s chateau, it's a playful blend of Agatha Christie and Douglas Sirk, with Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Bart heading a stellar cast.