It's summer in the city and the girls are pretty in Spanish actor Antonio Banderas’s second outing as a director, El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain). Set in his native Málaga in the 1970s, this elegiac recollection of an extended summer idyll of a group of friends is perhaps too preoccupied with finding the right atmosphere to cross over into the mainstream; the self-consciously arty stance will enthral some (who might decipher the preoccupations of a nascent auteur) and bore others to death. The film won the Europa Cinema label at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and could have some theatrical exposure abroad before finding its way to a long afterlife on DVD and as a cult item on TV.

French director Patrice Leconte takes things easy in his latest film Mon meilleur ami (My Best Friend) or How to Gain a Friend in Ten Days. Predictable from start to finish, this is the type of dramatic comedy that often gets labelled as pleasant, which means that it is not laugh-out-loud funny and inoffensively hobbles along to an ending that could have been spotted miles away. With Daniel Auteuil as the successful art dealer who is clueless about friendships and friends, this item could find some success offshore as a French comedy with a big name director and star in much the same way as Francis Veber’s La doublure (The Valet), which also starred Auteuil and co-starred Dany Boon, who is Auteuil's foil here.

A father and his 14-year-old son travel from contemporary rural Bosnia to the Croatian capital for a film audition in director Ognjen Svilicic’s Armin. Going the exact opposite route of the riotous bombast of Sarajevo-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica, Svilicic (Oprosti za kung fu/Sorry for Kong Fu) films his drama as an intimate two-hander that mainly plays out between father and son. The film’s contents may not be revolutionary enough to travel far and wide, but its sweet nature and good humour will certainly seduce some. It won the main prize in the East of the West Competition at the recent Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and was also screened at this year’s Berlinale.

Stanislaw Mucha’s Hope (Nadzieja) is the last film in a trilogy from erstwhile Kieslowski screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, after Tom Tykwer’s Heaven and Danis Tanovic’s L’enfer. The three films represent not only the Dantesque concepts of heaven, hell and purgatory but also the Christian ideals of love, faith and hope. In Piesiewicz’s story of Franciszek, an angelic youth bent on forcing an art thief to return a stolen religious painting, it becomes clear that the hope for redemption (which is what purgatory is all about) is not as straightforward as it seems -- every deed done to make amends may cause irreparable collateral damage of its own. Beautifully acted and shot and with a thought-provoking screenplay that is vintage Piesiewicz, Hope looks all set for an international career in the finer arthouses around the world.