Sam Taylor-Wood’s feature debut Nowhere Boy charts the turbulent teenage years of music legend John Lennon, but you wouldn’t know that from the title alone. You could say it’s a missed opportunity to cash in on a household name, but the title is actually a perfect fit; Nowhere Boy is a solid urban drama on its own accord, it doesn’t need to flaunt Lennon’s famed name to be enjoyed. The fact that the young Liverpool lad depicted on-screen goes onto create arguably the most famous band of all time feels almost coincidental.

Just off the beaten track from Wolf Creek and Cape Fear is Rupert Glasson’s promising feature debut Coffin Rock; a must-see destination for deftly crafted thrills and chills. In fact, this surprisingly good thriller might even satisfy those without a lust for blood, as the film initially masquerades as an earnest drama about a rural couple’s fruitless attempt to conceive a child. But as soon as a psychopathic third party gets involved (ala Fatal Attraction with the gender roles reversed), Coffin Rock suddenly shifts into high-gear for a fierce, if somewhat contrived, horror finale.

With past trophies like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, a film by Sam Mendes has a statistically significant probability of transcending the realms of cheap laughs and light-hearted fluff. So you can imagine my surprise when Away We Go wasn’t a black hole of jaded cynicism and suburban disillusionment.

If anything, it was warmly funny and an interesting exploration of modern fears and hopes surrounding family, love and identity. It follows the journey (read: roadtrip) of a thirty-something American couple, Verona De Tessant (Maya Rudolph) and Burt Farlander (John Krasinski), who set out to find their uniquely own place to nest as they expect their first child. Along the way, they reconnect with a motley collection of friends and family, who show them what their life together could be but predictably enough, what their lives won’t be.

“There’s one in all of us” declares the poster for Spike Jonze’s (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) long awaited adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s celebrated children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. The tag-line is of course referring to a Wild Thing; an eccentric species of mischievous monsters that belong to the young, imaginative mind of misunderstood Max. They represent the part of us that still loves to get our clothes muddy. The part of us that wants to howl when we don’t get what we want. The part of us that, when no one else seems to understand, just wants to run away into our own imaginary world. In other words, they’re our inner child. And if Sendak’s book spoke directly to our to the child that is inside all of us, Jonze’s film lets it run wild for 100 magical minutes.

What would you do if you could travel through time? What would you change? If you really think about these questions, there are probably some fairly loaded answers. The object of time, if there is such a thing, and the vivid memories that come to pass within it are things we take an interest in – even more so when we’re older. But to take things for granted? We do that every single day without realising it, regardless of age. Ideas of trusting our instinct and the little voices in our heads are taken to an extreme in The Time Traveller’s Wife, where those attributes are formed in the shape of a human being just like all of us. And he too has to live with the pain that comes with life’s joy.

After all these years, Scott Hicks still finds himself so drawn to little old Adelaide. It’s taken a long time for him to film there again after the huge unexpected success of Shine (1996); although the off-beat Hollywood path he’s followed has been successful, it seems that ultimately there’s no place like home. But for anyone who’s seen Hicks’ work, the poignancy is critical no matter the location. This Australian-English co-production gives that and more as an adaptation of the memoir by English sports journalist Simon Carr, and offers a story about grief that explores the struggles of a motherless family.