Raul Ruiz dispenses with fact and seeks to recreate the world that shaped a mind in Klimt, his revisionist assault on the artist biopic. Taking his cue from the works of Arthur Schnitzler, Ruiz presents the later life of Gustav Klimt as a dream world revisited from his deathbed in 1918. Consequently, incidents whirl like the dizzying images passing through John Malkovich's subconscious, as he recalls the women who modelled for his paintings and bore his children, the artists and philosophers who aroused his ire in the cafés of Hapsburg Vienna and the patrons who feted and exploited him. In the midst of this reverie is Stephen Dillane, as a fictional civil servant who links episodes and keeps Klimt in mind of Lea de Castro (Saffron Burrows), the elusive Muse who inspired some of the Secessionist's most sensual pictures.

Gilbert Adair's dialogue is often awkward and Ruiz's staging and structuring occasionally feel precious, but the period trappings couldn't be more exquisite and Ricardo Aronovich's photography has a gallery quality. So, while this is a demanding portrait, it's still a compelling one.

Stuffed with moments of surreal horror and bleak satire, Lunacy is a mortifying allegory on the post-Soviet world that ranks among Jan Svankmajer's finest achievements. Borrowing from such literary sources as the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe and such cinematic classics as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (1933), Svankmajer turns tormented traveller Pavel Liska's eccentric encounter with Jan Triska's decadent aristocrat into a nightmare that exposes the perils of both crushing oppression and untrammelled liberty. With stop-motion sequences of creeping flesh punctuating proceedings, this is a despondent vision of a world out of control that is made all the more disconcerting by the contrast of anachronistic details with the black mass, premature burial and asylum revolt that Triska inflicts upon his hapless victim.

Lonesome fiftysomething bailiff Patrick Chesnais finds unexpected affection in Stéphane Brizé's Not Here to Be Loved, a slow-burning charmer whose hesitant emotions and hasty outbursts lend proceedings an irresistible bittersweetness. Small details are key to this studied portrait of a son whose devotion to his ingrate father (Georges Wilson) not only extends to visiting him at his care home each Sunday, but also to taking over the detested family business. However, the hiring of a new assistant convinces Chesnais that he has been wasting his life and he signs up for tango lessons and soon becomes enamoured of Anne Consigny, a 40-year-old school counsellor, who is learning to dance for her imminent wedding to Lionel Abelanski, a teacher more interested in his failing novel than his fiancée's growing disillusion.

Finally, Black Gold is a well-meaning treatise on the institutionalisation of greed that centres on Ethiopian Tadesse Meskela's attempts to bypass the commodity exchanges in order to strike the fair trade deals that will deliver from starvation the 70,000 members of his Oromo Coffee Farmers Co-op. British directors Marc and Nick Francis also pay tribute to the likes of Italian Ernesto Illy, whose determination to give the growers a better percentage contrasts with the machinations of the multinationals that strive to keep prices low for the benefit of their customers and shareholders. But when it comes to tackling those who profit from the iniquities of the global economic system, the brothers allow them to damn themselves with naive or smug pronouncements rather than confronting them with their complicity in the impoverishment of the developing world.

Yet, while it may prompt some to think again next time they're in Starbucks, this astute insight into the coffee business is better at lauding the good guys than taking the corporates to task for the iniquities of the global economy.