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Rutger Hauer, Dolf de Vries and Derek de Lint become friends with house president Jeroen Krabbé after a public humiliation misfires and he introduces them to confidantes Huib Rooymans, Eddy Habbema and Lex van Delden. However, the threat of a German invasion in May 1940 changes their lives forever, with Krabbé becoming a British spy and Habbema working covertly as a radio operator, while worrying how to protect Jewish fiancée Lex van Delden. Rooymans is also Jewish and he faces expulsion from the university, while De Vries attempts to ignore the coming conflict and continue with his studies. But, as De Lint's mother is of German descent, he quits the Dutch army when she is arrested and joins the SS in the hope of securing her release.

Meanwhile, Van Delden is placed in charge of a resistance cell and Hauer signs up, more from a sense of adventure than patriotic duty. However, a disastrous mission forces him to recognise the gravity of the situation and he is smuggled to Britain with Krabbé, where they have an audience with Queen Wilhelmina (Andrea Domburg) and make plans with Colonel Edward Fox for a dangerous return behind enemy lines. But knowing who to trust quickly becomes a problem, with supposed Nazi stooge Guus Hermus turning out to be a fierce loyalist, while one of Hauer's closest pals proves to be a traitor, albeit for the most understandable of reasons. Even military secretary Susan Penhaligon has her motives for encouraging both Hauer and Krabbé to fall in love with her.

Verhoeven indulges in such occasional moments of melodrama, but he largely eschews sensationalism in directing this exciting, but authentic memoir of life during wartime. Roland de Groot's production design, Elly Claus's costumes and Jost Vacano's photography reinforce the period feel, while the wealth of small details about the operating procedures of the Gestapo, the underground and the government in exile confound complaints that this is more a gung-ho actioner than an informed account of the Occupation. Despite its limited budget, it's certainly more rooted in realism than Black Book (2006) and Verhoeven also seems more in control of his large and uniformly impressive cast.

Rutger Hauer is the standout, as the Roelfzema character, with his tango with De Lint after he gatecrashes a party being one of the set-piece highlights. But such incidents of bravura are rare in a picture that emphasises the ruthlessness of conflict and the occasional need for even those espousing a just cause to fight dirty.

The Dutch capital provides the setting for Hans-Christian Schmid's Storm, a political thriller that raises some thought-provoking issues without ever catching light. Earnestly played by a strong cast, this is a laudable attempt to examine the extent to which realpolitik impinges upon the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. However, with its implausible plotting and excess of awkwardly expository dialogue, the action is ultimately buried beneath its own good intentions.

Passed over for promotion, war crimes prosecutor Kerry Fox grudgingly accepts boss Stephen Dillane's request to question star witness Kresimir Mikic, who can place Yugoslav National Army commander Drazen Kuhn at the scene of an atrocity in the Bosnian town of Kasmaj in 1993. However, Mikic fabricates part of his testimony and commits suicide in disgrace. So, with judge Bent Mejding keen to expedite proceedings, a case that has taken three years to prepare looks set to collapse unless Fox can succeed in persuading Mikic's married sister, Anamaria Marinca, to relive her experiences in a military brothel in the spa of Vilina Kosa.

Had Schmid stuck to the central premise, this might have made a tense courtroom drama. But the fussily photographed action is strewn with contrived subplots, involving Marinca's marriage to German Steven Scharf, the endangerment of their son (Joel Eisenblätter) by Kuhn's thuggish allies and Fox's romance with EU bigwig Rolf Lassgård, who is negotiating entry terms with Kuhn's political opponents, who rule his native republic of Srpska . Moreover, there is a surfeit of inconsequential secondary characters, like assistant prosecutor Alexander Fehling), witness escort Wine Dierickx and sniffy court official Alexis Zegerman. Thus, with Fox failing to convey the conflict between her careerism and her social conscience, this unconvincing lurches to its deeply compromised conclusion.

If Kasmaj feels anything but a town at the centre of a supposedly civilised continent, Bucharest similarly seems like somewhere from another time and place to provincial teenager Andreea Bosneag in Radu Jude's The Happiest Girl in the World, as she travels from Geoagiu Bai to the Romanian capital with parents Violeta Haret Popa and Vasile Muraru to collect the car she has won in a competition sponsored by a soft drink company.

As part of her prize, Bosneag has shoot a commercial that requires her to sit in a beribboned Logan Break and deliriously gush about how lucky she is before downing half a bottle of fruit juice. However, director Serban Pavlu, producer Diana Gheorghian and client Alexandru Georgescu have very different ideas about how Bosneag should deliver her line and how much garishly orange liquid she should consume. Consequently, she has to endure endless retakes that are punctuated by crude remarks from the crew and frequent trips to the make-up caravan and a nearby portable toilet.

Further sapping Bosneag's meagre reserves of jollity is the fact that Popa and Muraru want her to sell the car so they can convert her dying grandmother's house into a bed and breakfast that will enable them to quit their dead-end jobs. However, Bosneag has set her heart on using her new motor to impress classmates who dismiss her as a dumpy wallflower and she resists her parents' increasingly underhand emotional blackmail while brooking yet more delays, as Georgescu demands a trendier location than the city's university district.

Considering the extent to which Romania's Communist past continues to impact upon its capitalist present, this appears a rather laboured lampoon of town-and-country attitudes and the contrasting expectations of the different generations. But Jude exploits the absurdist potential of the interminable repetitions to expose the lack of direction that has hamstrung the country since December 1989 and question the more dubious benefits that free-market libertarianism has brought. Cinematographer Marius Panduru makes telling use of the confined vehicular spaces and the gridlocked roads, while the costumes and hairstyles are as callously hilarious as much of the dialogue. But it's the clumsy finagling of Popa and Muraru and Bosneag's passage from sullen resistance to sudden realisation that she can turn the situation to her advantage that makes this so comically compelling.

Easily Germany's best Turkish film-maker, Fatih Akin made his international reputation with Head-On (2004), an intense, yet frequently tender and witty tale of a marriage of convenience that transforms the fortunes of boozing loser Birol Unel and rebellious spirit, Sibel Kekilli.

They meet in a psychiatric clinic run by Hermann Lause and Kekilli proposes in the hope that Unel will get her away from her devout Muslim parents Aysel Iscan and Demir Gokgol, and her over-protective brother, Cem Akin. Helped by buddy Guven Kirac, the reluctant Unel spruces himself up and Kekilli's family consent to the match. However, rather than proving a dutiful wife, Kekilli turns out to be a wild child, who leaves nightclubs with a different conquest each time and while Unel is initially prepared to go along with this - as he's having a fling with Kekilli's hairdressing boss, Catrin Striebeck - he fights back on realising that he has fallen and winds up in prison.

The sequences in which Unel rediscovers himself in the glow of Kekilli's lust for life are staged with a sensitivity to character that contrasts with the stereotypical prejudices of Kekilli's traditional family and Unel's seedy affair with Striebeck. But having taken such care in establishing the relationship, Akin shatters it with an inevitable tragedy that unleashes a torrent of melodramatic occurrences that makes the conclusion feel rushed and contrived. Nevertheless, Unel and the debuting Kekilli are as impressive as Akin's atmospheric snapshots of Hamburg and Istanbul.

The son of an acclaimed Georgian film-maker, Gela Babluani made an immediate and indelible impact with his chilling debut feature, Tzameti (2005). It opens like a social drama, as 20 year-old George Babluani repairs roofs to feed his immigrant family. But the action becomes increasingly Hitchcockian, as the corruptible innocent steals a letter addressed to deceased employer Philippe Passon, after his widow refuses to pay her debt. Assuming Passon's personality, Babluani finds himself travelling cross-country with various strangers (including the police) on his tail. However, events suddenly shift from the teasing to the terrifying, as Babluani is trapped by pitiless gangsters into a murderous game of Russian roulette that proves as compelling as it's macabre.

Saddled with the No.13, Babluani manages to survive until the last round, by which time he has come to share focus with fellow contestant Aurelien Recoing and histrionic referee Pascal Bongard, who comes close steal the closing sequences. Yet, while the fate of the players is tantalising, it's the efficient direction, Tariel Meliava's noirish monochrome cinematography and the sheer audacity of Sabine Bauchart's screenplay that mark this as something genuinely extraordinary.

Some critics complained that the picture owed too much to the likes of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Deer Hunter (1978), Fight Club (1999) and Intacto (2001). But Gela Babluani's rigorous attention to detail, particularly during the tortuous trip to Valersay, often recalls Robert Bresson, even though this remorseless study of caprice, envy, luck and the cheapness of life lacks the French master's moral integrity.

Prolific, quirky and impossible to categorise, South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk tackles the national fixation with plastic surgery in Time (2006), an anti-romcom that opens with Park Ji-yeon dumping boyfriend Ha Jeong-woo after tiring of his roving eye and opting for facial reconstruction to test his affection. However, her gambit backfires, as though Ha misses her, he develops a crush on waitress Seong Hyeon-ah and then has his own features remodelled after realising that Seong and Park are one and the same.

Riven with cruel irony and droll melancholia, this mischievous treatise slyly probes the differences between passion and obsession and the dangers of judging by appearances. It's also beautifully photographed by Seong Jong-mu, with the images of a coastal sculpture park being particularly memorable.

Seong also shot Kim's next offering, Breath (2007), in which Zia (aka Park Ji-ah) plays a sculptress whose boredom with husband Ha Jeong-woo prompts a fascination with Chang Chen, a death row prisoner whose suicide bid with a sharpened toothbrush handle makes the TV news and reminds Zia of her own nine year-old near-death experience when she held her breath under water for a dare. Convincing the jail's CCTV operator that she's Chang's old flame, Zia pays him occasional visits and gradually becomes more physically intimate, as she decorates the room to suit the season and sings him apposite songs.

A chamber piece that echoes both Kim's masterpiece, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2003), and the less-admired 3-Iron (2004), this study of opposites connected by unforeseen spiritual and emotional ties is typically offbeat and stylised, and exerts the same mesmerising grip as Kim's previous 13 features. A homoerotic subplot involving cellmate Gang In-hyeong doesn't quite work. But Zia and Chang make an affecting couple, while Kim combines wit and tenderness with a subtlety that isn't always appreciated in his work.

Writer-director Samuel Maoz also makes exemplary use of confined spaces in Lebanon, a visceral account of a four-man Israeli tank crew's experiences on the first day of the 1982 invasion that ranks alongside such other autobiographical anti-war films as Joseph Cedar's Beaufort (2007) and Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir (2008). Superbly played by a taut ensemble, the action is photographed with great percipience by Giora Bejach, who adeptly augments the tension by using the vehicle's viewfinder and night-vision facility to contrast the quartet's alternating fortitude and vulnerability as it becomes detached from the vanguard and finds itself in a hazardous no man's land.

New gunner Yoav Donat has barely been introduced to officer Itay Tiran, smart alec loader Oshri Cohen and nervous driver Michael Moshonov before they are pitched into action as back-up to a paratroop unit that is reccying a village that has already been pounded by the air force. On the outskirts, Donat hesitates when a car approaches and his equivocation costs the life of a soldier, whose agonising last seconds he watches through the range finder. Ordered to be more proactive, Donat blasts the next truck that approaches. However, he succeeds only in mutilating a civilian carrying a cargo of chickens and he is flashed a look of contempt by field commander Zohar Strauss, as he puts the screaming victim out of his misery with a single bullet to the head.

Rolling into the heart of the scarred settlement, the crew witnesses a terrorist hostage situation in a gutted building. Dismayingly, Donat's indecision again proves fatal and he peers through his gun sight as a terrified Reymond Amsalem rushes into the street after her family's slaughter and is forced to strip by a twitchy trooper to show she's not a suicide bomber. Having survived a rocket attack, the tank becomes a mobile prison for Syrian captive Dudu Tasa and Strauss orders them to hand him over to Phalangist fanatic Ashraf Barhom after they rendez-vous deep in enemy territory.

However, even the hard-bitten Strauss is beginning to doubt the sagacity of the orders coming from headquarters and it's with some reluctance that he agrees to follow Barhom back to safety. Naturally, even this simple mission misfires and, after it refuses to hand over Tasa to certain execution, the foursome finds itself stranded in a backstreet, immobilised and out of radio contact. Consequently, it takes an act of selfless courage to save the day.

Eschewing the rights and wrongs of the conflict to focus solely on human reactions in extremis, Maoz has created a much more chilling and immediate insight into the pressure, uncertainty and horror of frontline action than Kathryn Bigelow managed in her over-praised Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker. Beside a couple of testy exchanges between Tiran and Cohen and an erotic adolescent reminiscence about anguish, the dialogue is pretty perfunctory. But Alex Claude's sound effects and Nicolas Becker's score punch home the crew's isolation and understandable tendency to fear the worst from each shock of artillery fire and outbreak of ominous silence.

Moreover, Maoz adeptly cuts between the tensions in the claustrophobic cabin and the mayhem unfolding outside, which he devastatingly allows to intrude in the form of the seething Strauss, the corpse of the IDF casualty, the petrified Tasa and the sinister Barhom. Bookended by contrasting views of a sunflower field, this is an uncompromising and deeply personal recollection. But it lacks the political and ethical complexity, the character strength and the psychological depth to match its technical dexterity. Thus, while this reflects the chaos and callousness of combat, it doesn't always make it easy to identify or empathise with the protagonists.

Laís Bodanzky makes a much better job of keeping track of his characters in The Ballroom, a superbly choreographed compendium of six stories that are effortlessly interwoven during a night of terpsichorean passion at a São Paulo gafieira. Majestically photographed by Walter Carvallho, this belies the fact it's the work of 10 writers to achieve a sinuous unity that recalls both the ensemble outings of Robert Altman and, more specifically, Ettore Scola's Le Bal (1983) and La Cena (1998).

The clientele at Chega de Saudade are mostly elderly, but sound technician Paulo Vilhena's girlfriend Maria Flor provides some young blood and charmer Stepan Nercessian is irresistibly drawn to her, even though he has just been flirting with Cássia Kiss, whom he loves, but has never summoned up the courage to tell. The same is true of Leonardo Villar, the onetime king of the ballroom, who has broken his foot and becomes increasingly testy with forgetful partner Tônia Carrero, who just wishes he would be more courteous to her in public. Betty Faria similarly craves companionship and feels betrayed when the womanising Luiz Serra makes a beeline for her neighbour, Miriam Mehler, whom she had only invited as an act kindness. Domingos de Santis also regrets his decision to take wife Marly Marley dancing for her birthday, as she is set on a collision course with his mistress, Conceição Senna, while neglected tycoon's spouse Clarisse Abujamra sits in a booth and eyes up a likely contender to be tonight's sexual conquest.

With Elza Soares and Marku Ribas providing the sensual Latin numbers that keep the dance floor packed, this is a masterly blend of music, comedy and melodrama that explores the old adage about being as young as you feel with deceptive discretion. The cast is uniformly magnificent, with Beno Bider and Marcos Cesana also meriting respective mention, as a portly loner forced to dance solo and the put-upon waiter dreaming of his own life of leisure. Set-pieces like the ladies' excuse me and a power cut add a certain frisson, while Villar's monochrome reveries about his deceased wife and his former glory reinforce the pervading moods of fond nostalgia and melancholic regret. But it's Bodanzky and editor Paulo Sacramento's exemplary use of Carvallho's gliding tracks, bustling handheld images and forensic close-ups that best allows viewers to catch every gesture and expression as the ageing revellers confront the woes, frustrations and disappointments of their senectitude, while desperately seeking to recapture the all-too-fleeting pleasures of their long lost youth.