***

Helen Hunt deserves kudos for agreeing to repeatedly be photographed in a less-than-flattering manner here, although it's hard to see how she had any other choice. The movie, which she directed and co-wrote, never gives her a moment's peace. Hunt's lack of vanity ups the intimacy in this slight 'dramedy' about a woman who discovers late in life that she has a jerk for a husband (Matthew Broderick – of course) and an over-ebullient Bette Midler as her birth mother. Can an affair with tempestuous single dad Colin Firth make up for these disappointments? Not entirely.

• Released September 19

LINHA DE PASSE (15)

***

Sandra Corveloni's performance won her the best actress award at Cannes in this tough but touching Brazilian drama. Four sons, including Vinícius de Oliveira, right, and their pregnant mother have a limited set of options: crime, football, religion, or finding a long-disappeared father. Everything about Linha De Passe is modest – the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. A strong screenplay manages to make this recurrent theme in Brazilian film feel fresh while non-professional actors add grit to the realism.

• Released September 19

THE CHASER (18)

***

You may groan at the prospect of another serial killer on the loose, but this slick, sharply-plotted South Korean police drama goes further than most. It also features an unusually sympathetic cop (Yun-Seouk Kim) turned pimp who is irked that his girls keep disappearing before clearing their debts with him. While trying to track them down, he finds a clue that the vanished girls were all called up by the same client whom one of his girls is meeting right now. If Neil Jordan was making gritty police procedurals, they might be this intense, odd and compelling.

• Released September 19

LIVE! (15)

***

Life, for some, is a cabaret. But for the contestants in this mockumentary, it's more like a casino. Eva Mendes stars as a TV boss with a new reality show. A demographically mixed bag of contestants submit to a game of chance where the winner will not be shot in the face in a round of Russian roulette. How's that for luck? A black comedy that delivers rather more than the usual rant against exploitative reality TV, and Mendes's tough girl act gets used to far better effect here than in The Women.

• Released September 19

THE WAVE (15)

***

This politically charged drama is set in modern Germany, where a Ramones-loving teacher convinces his class of apathetic, unruly teenagers of the merits of obedience. The students take to it and soon, what started as a simple classroom experiment grows into a paradigm of a dictatorship. Based on a classroom experiment conducted at an American high school that inspired a novel, play and short film, this German version could be the depressive, unhygienic antidote we all need before the forthcoming High School Musical 3.

• Released September 19