Top 10 films of the week. NEW!

1.Cave of Forgotten Dreams | Rating: * * * *

For Werner Herzog's first 3D film, the director journeys into Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave to revel in the mystery of the earliest cave drawings ever found.

2. The Company Men | Rating: * * * *

A thoughtful study on the impact of the economic slump on the downsizing class, Ben Affleck and Tommy Lee Jones play characters forced to battle the toll that unemployment takes on their egos, libidos and social standing.

3. Ballast | Rating: * * * *The suicide of one African-American twin sends his brother into a catatonic depression, while a 12-year-old living nearby, and his single mother, flee their home after an attack. Quite a debut here from writer-director Lance Hammer, working on a minuscule budget in the Mississippi Delta.

4. Submarine | Rating: * * *

Richard Ayoade's debut feature film is set in Wales during the 1980s. A coming-of-age story about young Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a bookish, would-be intellectual who imagines his life as a film. Submarine is poised and studded with good things, but filmmaking this self-consciously stylised and citational will always lack the emotional impact that its director secretly and belatedly craves.

5. The Eagle | Rating: * * *

Kevin Macdonald’s adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s much-loved story is a tangled interplay of pride, loyalty and masculinity.

6. Limitless | Rating: * * *

The movie is a combination of stimulating, playful and a little half-baked; it remains a great idea, and keeps reviving itself with gratifying jolts of energy and inspiration.

7. The Lincoln Lawyer | Rating: * * *

Matthew McConaughey stars in this movie about a blithely unscrupulous LA defence attorney. It feels like a throwback vehicle, a time capsule from the Nineties era of Grisham potboilers

8. Chalet Girl | Rating: * * *

Chalet Girl is all about Felicity Jones, the rising star even more convincing than Carey Mulligan at playing a teenager, despite being 27. The film, a packaged Alpine-slope romcom with Cinderella overtones, keeps threatening to sink into a squishy mulch of inadequately scripted formula, and she keeps buoying it right back up.

9. Fair Game | Rating: * * *

A conspiracy thriller directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity; Swingers), this CIA drama snoops in on the immediate weeks post-9/11, recounting real-life events as agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) is assigned to gaining access to the experts on Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

10. Norwegian Wood | Rating: * * *

A brave attempt to bring Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel to the big screen. The focus on the eroticism and loneliness of central characters Toru Watanabe and Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) is visually beautiful, but often this Tokyo-set coming of age drama comes across as a mere summary of the book.