The movie business lives and dies by hype. So it's always pleasing to stumble across a picture that has not been ballyhoo'd to the nines and which contains a star-in-the-making whom the media has yet to tarnish with cheap celebrity.

Amy Adams lights up Junebug, Phil Morrison's pleasingly understated study of clashing cultures and backwater frustration. Yet, she never seeks to outshine her co-stars, who seem content to bask in her glow. Heavily pregnant and hooked on the fashion tips and tittle-tattle she reads in chic lifestyle magazines, she seizes on Embeth Davidtz's city sophisticate sister-in-law with a voluble excitement that's charmingly tinged with gauche inelegance. Yet she's much more than a provincial wannabe, as she is genuinely devoted to her moody, underachieving husband (Ben McKenzie) and exhibits a touching sense of acceptance when her dreams are cruelly dashed.

Her vibrant performance contrasts sharply with that of Alessandro Nivola, as Davidtz's younger husband. The reason for his reluctance to return to his dysfunctional homestead when Davidtz's Chicago gallery owner discovers an eccentric artist in the neighbourhood is left to speculation. But this intriguing vagueness becomes a source of frustration, as his growing introspection comes to seem like caprice rather than the result of a crucial psychological suppression.

Davidtz's dealings with naive artist Frank Hoyt Taylor also feel occasionally contrived, as Morrison tries to teach her the importance of family whether it comes in the form of a gold-digging sister (Joanne Pankow) or a mother-in-law (Celia Weston) whose hostility is born out of midlife broodiness. But much of the film's wincingly wry humour comes from Davidtz's determinedly gracious, but consistently condescending attempts to come to terms with her situation, most notably during a late-night bid to help McKenzie with a college book report.

Morrison laces the action with equally adroit sequences (at McKenzie's packing plant, the church social and the baby shower) which suggest that, despite Adams's aspirations, most of the locals are content with their lot and he poignantly stresses this gentle tension between backyard and big city during the conflicted Nivola's affectionate bedside chat with Adams, which confirms that she's a talent to look out for.

There's more family discord, albeit of a raunchier variety, in Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Cockles and Muscles, which features another standout performance, this time from the strangely underrated Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.

Echoes of Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy and Roger Vadim reverberate around this winning summer sex romp and, as with Ducastel and Martineau's debut, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, the action has a musical feel. But the traditional French farce ultimately takes precedence, as the adulterous Bruni-Tedeschi, bisexual husband Gilbert Melki and confused son Romain Torres begin taking plenty of showers between assignations away from their Cote d'Azur villa with puny paramour Jacques Bonnaff, gay schoolboy Edouard Collin and hunk plumber, Jean-Marc Barr.

The themes of sexual honesty and family expectation are explored with suitable delicacy. However, there's a hint of underlying chauvinism that would have been more damagingly demonising were it not for a delightful display of infectious joie de vivre from Bruni-Tedeschi, whose singing is as enchanting as her spirit.

There are more coastal shenanigans in Jean-Franois Pouliot's Seducing Dr Lewis, which also goes under its French-Canadian title of La Grande Sduction. Faint hints of Spaniard Luis Garcia Berlanga's neo-realist gem Welcome Mr Marshall (1952) marble this small-town comedy, but it lacks the ensemble conviction to pull off its Capra-corny conceit.

Raymond Bouchard does splendidly as the mayor of the rundown Quebecois fishing port of Sainte-Marie-La-Mauderne, which needs to secure the services of a doctor to ensure the opening of a plastics factory. But, too few share his energetic enthusiasm, as he tries to turn their backwater into the kind of place that cricket-loving Montreal physician David Boutin could call home.

The opening prologue chronicling the community's prosperous past is neatly done. But, otherwise, Pouliot's direction too often plumps for the whimsical option as the criteria Bouchard needs to meet become increasingly contrived. It's easy-going entertainment, but it's short on real charm.

Finally, it's back to the 1960s for Paris Nous Appartient, one of the most enigmatic films of the nouvelle vague, which heads up the National Film Theatre's tribute to Jacques Rivette.

Although Rivette was the first of the Cahiers du Cinma critics to begin a feature film, he was the last to complete one as it took two years of borrowing equipment, scrounging 16mm stock and booking the cast's spare time to realise this disconcerting snapshot of a unique moment in film and political history.

The excitement of the New Wave is consistently contrasted with the dread of the Cold War, as naive provinciale Betty Schneider becomes obsessed with both theatre director Giani Esposito's production of Shakespeare's Pericles and the reasons why a young Spanish composer committed suicide. The performances are patchy, but the direction is masterly. Expertly exploiting the pretensions and paranoia of Bohemian Paris, Rivette steadily subverts the conspiracy thriller, while also mourning humanity's vanity, insecurity and transience.