Alternately tough, desperate and vulnerable, Cate Blanchett contributes a deeply moving portrayal to Little Fish, a consistently disconcerting Sydney drama about a reformed junkie's fraught bid to put her life back on track. Moreover, she's ably supported by Noni Hazlehurst, as her over-protective mother, and Hugo Weaving, as her bisexual stepfather, who relies on heroin provided by retiring gangster Sam Neill to cope with losing the fame that he once enjoyed as a rugby league star.

But while director Rowan Woods makes evocative use of the Little Saigon neighbourhood, he fails to integrate the drug deal subplot involving Blanchett's amputee brother, Ray Henderson, and her Vietnamese ex-boyfriend, Dustin Nguyen. Consequently, this sombre study of wounded courage and misplaced affection ends on an anti-climactic contrivance. Yet, such is the strength of his characterisation that Woods is able to prevent the interweaving storylines from becoming overly soap operatic, even when Jacquelin Perske's screenplay lapses into enigmatic ellipses that threaten to disrupt the meticulous pacing that often makes the picture feel like a calm between two storms, as the characters take stock of their mistakes and shruggingly decide to make some more.

A ruinously reflective air also pervades Philippe Garrel's Les Amants Reguliers. Following Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), Louis Garrel revisits the Paris riots of May 1968 in this epic, but ultimately frustrating, treatise on politics, poetry and passion. Garrel's father (who was part of the influential Zanzibar film group in the late 1960s) and cinematographer William Lubtchanski superbly capture the visual spirit of these post-nouvelle vague times and stage one exceptional sequence on the May Day barricades. But Garrel Jr.'s discussions of ideology and art with the indolent Julien Lucas too often tail off into a drug-fuelled incoherence that is nowhere near as compelling as his touchingly hopeless crush on free-spirited student, Clotilde Hesme. This is undoubtedly an evocative mood piece, which reveals that many Soixante-Huitards were merely trendy bourgeois kids seeking a little excitement. But, despite its ambition and integrity, it lacks the intensity to engross.

-A very different Paris is the setting for Pierre Morel's District 13. Trashed by French critics for pirating John Carpenter's Escape from New York, this is a thick-ear of an actioner that rattles through a formulaic plotline to its pleasingly unexpected conclusion. Scripted by Luc Besson and Larbi Naceri (who doubles nastily as the baddy), it touches on the issues of poverty and exclusion that prompted the eruptions in the Parisian banlieues earlier this year. But its main concern is putting vigilante David Belle and maverick cop Cyril Raffaelli through as many chases and fight sequences as possible, after they break into a walled-off ghetto to retrieve both a stolen WMD and Belle's abducted sister, Dany Verissimo. The cast hurls itself into the comic-book violence, while the combination of audacious stunt choreography and razor-sharp editing is consistently exhilarating. Consequently, this is tense, slick and blithely undemanding fun.

Finally, the BFI is hosting a mini filmfest at the WOMAD Festival in Reading next weekend. In addition to such firm favourites as Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Sam Wood's Marx Brothers gem A Night at the Opera (1935) and Jacques Tati's masterly summer satire, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), the programme also includes Marcel Camus's glorious Oscar-winner Black Orpheus (1958), which transfers the Greek myth to Rio at Carnival, and Richard Benjamin's My Favourite Year (1982), which features a knockout performance by Peter O'Toole as the boozing, womanising Hollywood swashbuckler who causes mayhem while guesting on Joe Bologna's 1950s TV show.