Irreplaceable review – a healthy prognosis for heartfelt drama

A country doctor struggles to come to terms with his own illness in a bittersweet French drama

Irreplaceable review – good-natured country doctor drama

Hints of All Creatures Great and Small suffuse this engaging tale of a rural medic forced to take on a younger female assistant after he is diagnosed with cancer

The Son of Joseph review – arch family drama

The story of a teenager’s quest to find his father is marred by laboured performances

The Son of Joseph review – a droll teen drama with hints of Wes Anderson

Eugène Green’s The Portuguese Nun was a gentle comic gem and his new film about a lonely boy is lovable in exactly the same way

The 50 best films of 2016 in the UK: No 2 Son of Saul

As our countdown continues, Andrew Pulver looks back on a harrowing Holocaust drama from Hungarian director László Nemes

The Ardennes review – a top new talent

Robin Pront’s debut feature about a family of criminals in Belgium is full of bold storytelling and striking visuals

The Black Hen review – war invades bucolic calm in Nepalese war drama

Maoist guerrillas inflict brutal violence on a village in this engaging debut, marked by dream sequences reminiscent of Buñuel

The Ardennes review – disappointing Belgian crime drama

This tale of familial crime and punishment starts promisingly, but lurches off in various unconvincing directions and badly loses its way

The Unknown Girl review – a rare misfire from the Dardenne brothers

A new edit of the Belgian auteurs’ oddball detective story can’t help its fundamentally baffling tone and form

The Dreamed Ones review – a poetic postwar love affair revisited

Two young actors become involved with Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann’s letters in this intriguing study of a famous relationship

Heritage of Love review – wretched, retchworthy Russian romance

An insufferable love story set in St Petersburg pre-1917 and Paris today, this regressive, saccharine film may have made serious rubles, but it has no merit

From The Great Escape to Sholay: what makes a film a national favourite?

Whether they tackle war, Soviet monotony or working-class suffering, the movies that countries take to their collective hearts tend to transcend age and class. We run through nine local treasures – and a few that fall just short