Sit Ho Ching used to be an everyday white-collar worker who had no ambition and no plans for his future. Everything went smoothly until one day, when his boss set him up and his girlfriend cheated on him, he suddenly became a jobless single man, which made him rethink his past life of duties and routines. From then on, he decides to pursue wealth and fame by all means.

A brilliant scientist gets trapped in her car after a terrible crash. Isolated, struggling to survive, she holds the key to cure a pandemic ravaging the world.

Hoping to leave behind troubled days in the Baltimore city police department, Nate Burns (Eddie Cibrian) journeys to Alaska, where he takes up a quiet life as a small-town sheriff and begins a romance with spirited bush pilot Meg Galligan (LeAnn Rimes). But when Meg’s father turns up dead, Burns finds himself thrust into the limelight of a dangerous murder investigation.

Staring into seemingly hopeless futures, half-siblings Carl and Jessie rebel against the ties that bind them to their dying town and to each other through an act of love both tender and traumatic that forces a generation of hard truths and recriminations out into the open.

The footloose ennui of Poland’s postwar generation is captured to perfection in this jazzy chronicle of a draft-dodger’s final day of freedom. A slacker before there was a word for it, Andrzej (played by Skolimowski himself) drifts through a series of open-ended encounters with women following a wake-up argument with his pouting wife, and a long-delayed military physical (the film’s title derives from one of the questions). Skolimowski hoarded four years’ worth of the annual film footage allotment from his Lódz film school in order to create this first feature marked by compositional bravado and a trademark air of the absurd. -Barbara Scharres, Gene Siskel Film Center

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan’s relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan’s fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

An isolated family, having already lost four members to poisoning, uses rituals and talismans to keep itself away from hostile townspeople.

An old count hides just before he dies to annoy his heirs. The heirs search a manor for the count’s body and are killed off one by one. Jean-Marie, his fiancée Micheline, and Edwige investigate the deaths and search for the count’s body.

A pair of teenage girls in rural Pennsylvania travel to New York City to seek out medical help after an unintended pregnancy.

Paul is a sweet man-child, raised — and smothered — by his two eccentric aunts in Paris since the death of his parents when he was a toddler. Now thirty-three, he still does not speak. (He does express himself through colourful suits that would challenge any Wes Anderson character in nerd chic.) Paul’s aunts have only one dream for him: to win piano competitions. Although Paul practices dutifully, he remains unfulfilled until he submits to the interventions of his upstairs neighbour. Suitably named after the novelist, Madame Proust offers Paul a concoction that unlocks repressed memories from his childhood and awakens the most delightful of fantasies.

Meredith Rossman is the uptight heiress of Rossman’s Department store. She has made the business her entire life, not leaving any time for Christmas or romance, much to the chagrin of her parents. But when she is roped into donning the store’s antique Mrs. Claus outfit to play Mrs. Claus at Rossman’s famous Santaville, her life takes some unexpected turns. Through the help of the suit and the charming store Santa, Nick, Meredith rekindles her love of Christmas, the store, their employees and possibly even begins a new love with Nick. He is mysterious, great with children and always there when you need him. Just like the real Santa….wait…could he be? One thing is certain: from the moment Meredith put on the magical Mrs. Claus dress, her life would never be the same!

The Sikand family learns they are part of an ancient bloodline and the only hope at continuing it is their gay daughter Savarna.