This film is rereleased as part of the nation's celebrations (led by the British Film Institute) in honour of the UK's most famous filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock.  His fifth film as director is only his second earliest to survive and has undergone extensive restoration to be complete for this summer.

Ivor Novello (the famed balladeer and performer) plays a shy boarding house tenant who inadvertently becomes chief suspect in a serial killer investigation.  Someone is going around London killing pretty blondes, and the fingers are being pointed at this mysterious man.  This film is also significant for being Hitchcock's first 'wrong man' mystery; the archetype of film wherein our hero is mistaken for being someone more dastardly, and acts a precursor for films including The Man Who Knew Too Much (both of them), Rear Window and North by Northwest.

Many people believe that this film, from 1926, is the first that can be truly described as 'Hitchcockian', and the director takes clear influence from his counterparts in Berlin practicing the sinister, fetishistic German Expressionism.  The film has been restored with a newly commissioned soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney.  The film, though, is reason enough to be inside a cinema auditorium for an hour and twenty minutes during this Indian Summer of ours.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is at the Curzon Mayfair and BFI Southbank now.

Faust is the final film in the biographical tetralogy of power examined by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.  Following Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, which looked at Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito respectively, Faust is a reworking of Goethe's masterpiece via Thomas Mann's masterpiece in its own right, set in the nineteenth century.  It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and is one of the most critically regarded films of the 2010s.

The tale is well known.  In this iteration, Heinrich Faust cannot resist the fair Gretchen.  Consumed by his desire for existential enlightenment, a pact with the devilish Mauricius (filling in here for the damnable Mephistopheles) sees our hero (in the broadest sense, that is) sealing his own fate with a series of decisions made by temptation and crave.

It's not a barrel of laughs, this film.  If you know the myth, you understand the complexities of emotion and personality that the legend explores.  Regardless, there is an inherent truth about humanity lightly woven within the complex narrative.  It's a work of art that explores what it means to be human and what it means to want.  It's a film that attempts to mirror and reflect its audience.  Disturbingly, it makes this all reassuringly satisfying, and that's a difficult thing for a film to pull off.

Faust is at the British Film Institute tonight, until 02 August.

A treat for you, dear readers.  Okay, the weather's rubbish but hopefully you've managed to get away for a bit.  If you haven't, I hope you have something lined up.  For those of you who have neither, book yourself a ticket to the Barbican cinema for tomorrow and do yourself the favour of settling in to watch one of the most romantic, most beautiful and heartwarming films ever made.

La Nouvelle Vague changed cinema.  Directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda brought us young screen gods such as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.  Francois Truffaut wrote the essay that started it all, and this film, Jules & Jim, may just be his masterpiece.

The titular characters are best friends whose relationship is put to the ultimate test by age, war and the love of Jeanne Moreau.  This was the film that made her an international star, and never has she been more innocent, beautiful, sexy and intelligent.  She embodied what the French New Wave was.  Made eight years before 1968 and the student riots, this film presents a Paris that is full of whimsy, bare floorboards, bicycles, cigarettes and sex.  Some may argue that there are no better examples of French cinema than this.  In a way, they might just be right.

Jules & Jim plays at the Barbican tomorrow.