Ten years ago, French filmmaker François Ozon scored an art-house hit with Swimming Pool, a supremely entertaining thriller and still one of the best movies about novelists and authorship in recent memory. After a decade of highs (Ricky) and lows (5x2), Ozon makes a successful return to similar territory with In the House, which again uses the act of writing as the launching pad for a thoughtful, deftly plotted mystery.

The Sopranos may be long over, but James Gandolfini just can't seem to get the heck out of New Jersey. Last year, he played the out-of-touch father of a wannabe Jersey rocker in David Chase's criminally underseen Not Fade Away, which arrives on DVD later this month, meaning you have no excuse for skipping it a second time. Now he's back in a Garden State state of mind in Down the Shore, an indie drama originally filmed in 2011 right on the Jersey shore made notorious by the eponymous MTV reality show -- an area that's now struggling to recover from the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Sandy.

If last year's effects-laden blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman (or, for that matter, ABC's ongoing Once Upon a Time) isn't your ideal re-telling of the classic fairy tale about a beautiful princess, an evil queen and a poisoned apple, you might fall under the spell of Blancanieves, a black-and-white silent version of the oft-told legend, written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger. Transported from medieval times to Seville circa 1920, the film also recasts Snow White's royal characters as bullfighting royalty, an alteration that, in execution, isn't as strange as it might initially sound.

If it weren't already being remade as a Vince Vaughn star vehicle (look for it this fall under the new, more generic title, The Delivery Man), the French-Canadian comedy Starbuck could have easily been retrofitted into a TV sitcom. Just take a gander at the premise: in his youth, fortysomething slacker-with-a-heart-of-gold David Wozniak (Patrick Huard, one of French-speaking Canada's biggest comedy stars, which is akin to being the biggest stand-up act in Des Moines) made frequent and copious donations to his local sperm bank under the alias "Starbuck." Just as he's weighing whether or not to settle down his girlfriend, who is carrying their child, he's informed that his vintage seed was exceptionally popular amongst the bank's clientele and he's now the father of over 500 grown children, a significant chunk of whom now want to meet him. Not wanting to openly admit his parentage (both due to the humiliation factor and the fact that he owes money to some thugs), he pays one-on-one visits to some of his offspring and -- without revealing his true identity -- helps them out of various jams. It's like My Name is Earl crossed with Guys With Kids! Coming this fall to NBC.

If you're anything like me, going into The Sapphires, you'll know embarrassingly little about the heartbreaking history of the Aboriginal Australians, and will mostly be interested in the film at the prospect of Motown music and Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd, Bridesmaids, Girls) -- and you'll leave a little bit better-educated, in tears and with about twelve different songs stuck in your head.

Usually the way nepotism works is that the offspring of some famous celeb is able to use his or her prestigious family name to help score the opportunity to write, director or act in their own feature (witness the careers of Scott Caan, Jaden Smith, Sofia and Roman Coppola, etc. etc.). K-11 can be viewed as a case of nepotism in reverse, as it marks the feature filmmaking debut of Jules Stewart, mother of Kristen "Bella" Stewart. A longtime script supervisor, Mama Stewart wrote and directed this micro-budgeted prison drama, which stars Goran Visnjic as a hotshot record producer who ends up in the slammer following a serious bender. But this isn't your ordinary garden variety prison -- no sir, it's a loony bin straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, one that's overseen by a cruel prison guard (D.B. Sweeney) and packed with kooky characters played by an odd assortment of semi-famous actors, from Kate del Castillo and Portia Doubleday to Tommy "Tiny" Lister and Jason Mewes.

After his leaden attempt at a superhero movie, The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry gets back to his low-budget roots with The We and the I and rediscovers his formidable formal playfulness in the process. Set entirely aboard a New York city public bus on the last day of high school before summer break, the film begins with a group of rambunctious high schoolers (all of whom are played by actual teenagers from the South Bronx and members of a prominent after-school drama program) boarding the vehicle and ends when the last of them disembarks roughly an hour and a half later. Apart from a handful of flashbacks and a brief pizza run when the bus is parked in traffic, we never venture through those double doors into the outside world. The bus, in effect, becomes a high school hallway in miniature, with the kids bitching about their lives, making up (and out) with each other and, in general, flirting like mad.

Remember the Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star where he played the heavy metal fan who wound up belting out the tunes for his favorite hair band? That film was based on the true story of Tim Owens, who became the frontman for Judas Priest after Rob Halford bailed. A similar tale played out in 2007 when the arena rock group Journey plucked a total novice, Filipino rocker Arnel Pineda, out of obscurity and put him center stage. Instead of inspiring another fictional feature, this particular piece of rock history has been turned into the documentary, Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey, which pulls double duty as both a Journey retrospective and the unlikely rags-to-riches story of an untested singer who goes from belting out signature tunes like "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Open Arms" in bars to sing them in front of packed stadiums.

Next to a Dane Cook comedy, few genres inspire less enthusiasm than the social issues drama -- movies that set out to make an impassioned statement about some kind of local, national or global problem, but neglect to do so in a dramatically compelling way. David Riker's The Girl would seem to fall into this category, given that it's been specifically rigged to address a topic that's very much in the news today: illegal immigration across the U.S./Mexico border. Fortunately, the film has a solid grasp on character and story to accompany its strong social conscious.

Mad Men goes to Chile in the Oscar-nominated No. Also, our takes on Shanghai Calling and A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.