Cinema history has been rather unkind to Carlos Saura. During the Francoist era, when so many Spanish film-makers had fled into exile or been coerced into silence, he was hailed as a courageous critic of the Fascist regime that had ruled with an iron fist since 1939. Indeed, such was his international reputation that the censors were wary of challenging his pictures for fear of provoking an embarrassing backlash.

But, with the restoration of the monarchy and the rise of the Madrileña movements in music and comedy and the `pasota' or `I don't care' ethos amongst the young, Saura was increasingly seen as a yesteryear figure, whose dance films were lauded for their dynamic beauty, but whose ventures into period drama and social realism were deemed overly formal and old-fashioned. Yet, while he has been eclipsed in some arthouse circles by the likes of Pedro Almodóvar, Saura remains an auteur of incalculable importance and the reissue of Cria Cuervos/Raise Ravens (1976) as part of BFI Southbank's Spanish Cinema After Franco season, should help restore some of his lost lustre.

Filmed as Francisco Franco was dying and premiered in Madrid four decades after the outbreak of the Civil War, Cria Cuervos took its title from the proverb `Raise ravens and they'll peck out your eyes' and exposed the legacy of violence that had been passed on by adults seeking to suppress guilty memories to their uncomprehending children. However, it is also a feminist treatise challenging the roles imposed upon women by a society rendered stiflingly conservative by a coalition of church, state, military and bourgeoisie and a tentative espousal of hope that time can heal the deepest scars and bitterest memories.

Following a credit sequence montage of family photographs, eight year-old Ana Torrent creeps down the stairs in her night clothes and sees married Mirta Miller hurriedly leaving Héctor Alterio's room. Torrent calmly enters and finds her father dead on the bed and removes a glass of milk from a sideboard and methodically washes it in the kitchen before stealing a piece of lettuce from the refrigerator for her guinea pig, Roni. As she turns to head back upstairs, she is stopped by her gently chiding mother, Geraldine Chaplin, and they embrace.

But not everything is as it seems. Chaplin died several months before from excruciating cancer and, while Torrent is sure that she has murdered Alterio for letting her beloved mother suffer, the white powder she believes to be poison is nothing more than bicarbonate of soda. Thus, the scene is set for a study in misconception, non-communication and corrupted innocence, in which the steelily impassive Torrent consoles herself with ghosts from the past in her confused bid to make sense of a detested present.

The middle child of three, Torrent lives in a sprawling compound in the centre of Madrid with sisters Conchita Pérez and Maite Sánchez, their mute and wheelchair-bound grandmother Josefina Díaz and their earthy maid Florinda Chico. However, the new head of the household is Chaplin's spinster sister, Mónica Randall, and Torrent decides to resist her authority after she tries to force her to kiss the uniformed Alterio as he lies in his coffin for soldier colleagues like Germán Cobos (who is married to Miller, but besotted with Randall) to pay their respects.

Randall wants the girls to tidy up the house and Chico resents both the implication that she has been slack in her work and the exhortation not to discuss her former employers in front of the children. Her enforced silence is echoed by that of the increasingly forgetful Díaz, who spends her days smiling sadly in front of a pinboard of mementoes that now form part of the family mythology that Torrent defends by playing Díaz a recording of 1930s chanteuse Imperio Argentina's `¡Hay, Maricruz!' and asking Chaplin (who gave up her chance of becoming a concert pianist to marry Alterio) to play Catalan composer Federico Mompou's `Canción y Danzas N.6'.

Yet, she also challenges this cosy domesticity by repeatedly playing `Porque te vas', a contemporary pop song about loss that was performed by Jeanette, an English-born singer whose accent catches Chaplin's own in playing Torrent's much-missed mother. (However, Saura also cast Chaplin as the grown-up Torrent looking back on events from 1995 and he had her lines dubbed by Spanish actress Julieta Serrano to emphasise the growing distinction between mother and daughter, despite their outward similarity.) A further sense that she half-appreciated that all was not sweetness and light comes when Torrent and Pérez don their parents' clothes and put on make-up to recreate one of their arguments. Even more disturbingly, the pair later get into an argument with Randall about the ownership of a rifle and a pistol that they insist Alterio had bequeathed them.

Having briefly contemplated her own suicide by jumping off a roof and buried her deceased pet, Torrent offers to relieve Díaz's silent suffering by using the powder that she had kept hidden in the basement after Chaplin had asked her to throw it out, as it could kill an elephant. But the old woman realises it is harmless and changes her mind about taking her leave. However, she cannot tell Torrent the truth and, consequently, the child is dismayed to discover the failure of her bid to finish off Randall with a doctored glass of milk when her aunt breezes into the bedroom to pack the trio off to school on the first day of a new term.

This new beginning leaves many questions unanswered - including the fate of Randall's romance with Cobos, which was interrupted by the firearms incident and seems much more genuine than Alterio's lustful advances towards Chico and Miller, which Torrent had respectively witnessed without comprehension in her father's study and at Cobos's country estate. But Saura was in no position at a time of such seismic transition to speculate about the future and takes care to exclude hindsight from Chaplin's Proustian monologues as the older Torrent.

However, his dissection of the trauma and guilt ravaging Spain in the mid-1970s is as incisive and unflinching as the shifts between reality and fantasy are astute and audacious. Saura's use of Teo Escamilla's camera is also accomplished, as he invites the audience to share Torrent's unique perspective and the tight shot-reverse-shot sequences that reveal her intimacy with Chaplin. Yet he employs static long shots to emphasise her detachment from Miller and forbidding top shots that stress the family's gloomy isolation from the bustling city and the imminent transformation it represents.

The performances are uniformly superb, as the cast responds to the claustrophobic atmosphere and stately pace. But, in only her second features (after excelling two years earlier in Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive), Ana Torrent is mesmerising as the sad-dark-eyed dreamer who sees much but understands little and whose unwillingness to let her mother go manages to keep alive the memory of those who perished in resisting tyranny. Moreover, by repeatedly fixing her gaze directly on the lens, she also implicates viewers in the hypocrisy that had underpinned the political, social and sexual repression in which they had acquiesced.

Despite its accusatory allegory, Cria Cuervos was the sixth most successful picture at the Spanish box office in 1976. It also landed the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. However, its full worth has been somewhat overlooked in the intervening 35 years and it's to be hoped that this reissue will re-establish it as one of the most important Spanish films ever made and Torrent's performance as one of the most powerful and poignant given by any child in screen history.

Once a key figure in the New Queer Cinema that emerged in the late 1980s, Gregg Araki has also suffered something of a critical reverse in recent years. However, he seems set to enjoy something of a revival with his tenth feature, Kaboom, which owes more to early outings like Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) than more mature efforts like Mysterious Skin (2004) and Smiley Face (2007).

This is, apparently, down to cult director John Waters, who pined for some old-school Araki while presenting him with an award, and there is more than a whiff of the Pope of Trash's own camp aesthetic in this gleefully manic amalgam of college comedy and conspiracy theory sci-fi. However, the wit is drier and the visual style more restrained than in the decadent romps with which Araki made his name. Moreover, the 50 year-old manages to limn the sex lives of nubile teenagers without arousing the kind of disconcerting controversy that accompanied such Larry Clark offerings as Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002).

Eighteen year-old ambisexual Thomas Dekker is supposed to be studying film at Southern California's College of Creative Arts, but he spends most of his time sleeping around campus and ogling his himbo surfer roommate, Chris Zylka. Best friend Haley Bennett is an equally lusty lesbian and her fling with French witch Roxane Mesquida leads Dekker to a plate of doped party cookies and a series of weird experiences that may or may not be dreams.

Having witnessed redhead Nicole LaLiberte being stabbed by a gang of black-clad figures in animal masks, Dekker becomes convinced of the existence of a cult named The New Order, which kidnaps and kills at will, and he spends a night trawling through incriminating websites that all vanish from his browsing history the next morning. But he still can't explain why people from his visions keep cropping up in reality or why he thinks one of them may be his long-dead dad.

As the end of the world seemingly comes no closer, Dekker allows himself to be distracted from his investigation by Zylka, British blonde Juno Temple and even his acerbic mother, Kelly Lynch. But the oddities keep happening and Dekker keeps bumping into eccentrics like stoner James Duval, Zylka's wrestling buddy Andy Fischer-Price, nude beach bather Jason Olive and online flirt Brennan Mejia right up to the zinger of a denouement. With Todd Fjelsted's candy-coloured Almodóvarian production design and Sandra Valde-Hansen's vibrant camerawork, this often feels like an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 or Skins that's been directed by David Lynch, Richard Kelly, Todd Solondz or George Kuchar under the supervision of John Waters and David Cronenberg. There's perhaps a hint that Araki is striving to show new kids on the block like Quebecois Xavier Dolan that he still does this kind of hedonistic caper better than anybody else. But, while the hipness occasionally feels a touch self-conscious, this is too confidently staged to suggest a director feeling either his age or creatively insecure.

Packing the dialogue with outlandish one-liners and coaxing relaxed performances from his often naked cast, Araki also makes amusing use of a panoply of optical gimmicks whose venerability contrasts with the modernity of the soundtrack. Ultimately, he rather loses the thread of the supernatural and apocalyptic plotlines, but this scarcely seems to matter in a picture that consistently backs up its contention that strange is the new normal.

By contrast, Fred Cavayé seems to delight in imparting plausible realism into the unlikeliest of scenarios. In Anything for Her (2008), he had middle-aged teacher Vincent Lindon crack a maximum security prison to free wrongfully sentenced wife Diane Kruger. Now, in Point Break, he sets trainee nurse Gilles Lellouche the tricky task of smuggling a police suspect out of a hospital in order to ensure the safety of pregnant spouse Elena Anaya. Naturally, with the aid of Alain Duplantier's hurtling camera, Benjamin Weill's full-tilt editing and Klaus Badelt's pounding score, Lellouche triumphs over every iota of adversity that Cavayé can hurl at him. Yet, even though this updating of the Hitchcockian `wrong man' plot is little more than a succession of ludicrous contrivances, it still makes for slick and undemanding entertainment.

Roschdy Zem bursts into the opening shot, as he flees from a couple of pursuers and is mown down in a tunnel by a speeding motorbike. As the baddies melt into the darkness, no one suspects that Zem has anything to hide when he is taken to the nearest hospital. But, when Lellouche prevents a murder attempt during the night shift, commandants Mireille Perrier and Gérard Lanvin take a sudden interest in him - although they are powerless to prevent Lellouche from knocking out a guarding gendarme with a defibrillator and whisking Zem away on a downtown bus after he fails to prevent Anaya from being abducted from their flat and learns by phone that she will die unless Zem is sprung within three hours.

Once on the run, Zem is forced to co-operate with Lellouche after a railway station exchange is thwarted by a couple of menacing thugs and Lellouche agrees to sew up his gaping stomach wound. Laying low in Zem's hideaway, Lellouche learns from the television news that he is wanted for the assassination of a business tycoon and calls Perrier to rescue him and Anaya from their nightmare. However, he unwittingly sets up an ambush and, after Lanvin guns Perrier down in cold blood, Lellouche hears from one of Lanvin's sidekicks that he was hired by the tycoon's son to kill his father during a staged robbery to prevent him being disinherited. Zem was duped into playing the safecracking patsy in the scam, but he escaped on realising he had been set up and Lanvin now wants him dead before he can get his hands on a memory stick containing CCTV footage of the hit.

A freak fire enables Zem to escape from under the noses of Lanvin's goons, while Lellouche leaps to the balcony of a neighbouring building to evade Perrier's dogged sidekick, Claire Perot. However, the fugitives are compelled to reunite when Zem discovers that Lanvin has offed his brother and Lellouche realises that Anaya is now a police hostage. But, even though Zem calls in a few favours with his Corsican and Romany contacts to create criminous chaos in downtown Paris, the pair still have to find Anaya and the incriminating stick before they can even begin to start clearing their names.

The trapping of baddies on a USB stick is hardly original or sophisticated (it was employed recently in Christian Ditter's German kidpix, The Crocodiles Strike Back). Yet Cavayé cannot be faulted for his action choreography, with the breakneck chase through the Opéra Métro station (which pays fitting hommage to Luc Besson's Subway, 1985) being compellingly kinetic and laudably packed with actual stuntwork and free of the both the shakicam and crash editing techniques that currently render so many similar American sequences all but indecipherable. He also slips in some dark humour and just a hint of gender politics, as he exposes the discrimination endured by both Perrier and Perot at the hands of their male colleagues. But this is primarily an exercise in setting pulses racing and if credibility and characterisation become casualties along the way, then there are worse causes in which to perish.

There is also plenty of hotfooting in the prolific Robbie Moffat's Got to Run. Yet, while Suzanne Kendall proves sportingly energetic, it's nowhere near as excitingly staged and will quickly wear the patience of those unwilling to look past the jogging lingerie saleswoman and enjoy the glorious Northern scenery captured by Bob Ramsay's camera. Indeed, it's hard to say when a more mediocre movie has cast such an unexpectedly hypnotic spell.

The storyline is threadbare in the extreme. Trapped in Slough, Kendall is bored with fetching and carrying for mechanic boyfriend Howard Corlett and gets anything but a thrill out of repping for tight-fisted underwear entrepreneur Jon-Paul Gates. So, in order to move her life off the back burner, she vows to make some changes when she returns from a week on the road.

However, the trip gets off to a frustrating start, as Bristol sex shop owner Laura Michelle Cleary cuts back on her order and the signs of the recession evident on every high street are confirmed as a hard sell in Cardiff is followed by a cancelled appointment in Wrexham. Checking into yet another Travelodge, Kendall decides to cheer herself up by getting plastered in a Liverpool pub. However, barman Bruce Lawrence picks up on her love of running and need for an escape route and gives her a list of 10 locations she should try out instead of flogging frillies.

Heading to Carlisle, Kendall decides to detour to Blackpool to run along the pier. Invigorated by the experience and a positive reading from fortune-teller June Hudson, she speaks directly to the camera about the paths she had previously not taken before hunkering down in her room with a paperback of Marley & Me. The next day, following an early morning dash around Castlerigg and a rather unnecessary show`n'tell session in Newcastle with Irish buyer Joe Rainbow, Kendall heads for the Angel of the North and on to Hadrian's Wall, where she resolves to stop letting Gates and Hawthorne dictate her future direction.

Consequently, she gives them both short shrift on the phone and makes a pilgrimage to Lindisfarne before crossing the border to scale Arthur's Seat. However, while in Edinburgh, she spots another girl working for Gates and calls to tell him where to stick his undies and sets off for a night's camping on the bank of the loch beneath Ben Lomond. She conquers the peak next morning and makes equally quick work of Glencoe and the Skye Bridge. But, while no one can doubt her stamina, she runs out of petrol some 20 miles short of the Highland region of Inverpolly and finds herself falling for the charms of local mechanic Jack Collins, who also just happens to be the highly intelligent and eminently eligible laird. By this point, it's almost a mercy that Kendall has reached her geographical and metaphorical journey's end, as the storyline has been stretched to breaking point and the quality of the dialogues and monologues could hardly deteriorate. But the combination of Ramsay's photography and Pascal Isnard's classical compositions (as opposed to the jazzier numbers that accompany the driving montages, with their endless views of road signs and clichéd landmarks) is hugely effective and recalls the mix of music and imagery that used to make the shorts produced by the British Transport Film Unit so enchanting. Editor Simon Harris also plays his part, although there is only so much one can do with shots of a woman in a baseball cap and an excessive array of jogging outfits for a five-day jaunt running towards or past a stationary lens.

For all its good intentions, this solo variation on Michael Winterbottom's The Trip misfires as both a credit cruch parable and a paean to female empowerment. But the vistas are sublime.