Asked to sum up her village’s qualities, the lady of the manor responds promptly: “Malice, envy, apathy, brutality.” Set in a Lutheran village in north Germany on the eve of the first world war, Michael Haneke’s Golden Palm-winning masterwork The White Ribbon () – a film of subtle savagery and mordantly encompassing vision – is rude about provincial life, rude about the causes and effects of provincial life. A certain kind of mean, inbred thinking, proposes Haneke, led to one war, possibly two. It handed down the legacy of spiritual myopia, masquerading as moral truth and far-sightedness, from man to man, and from man and woman to – above all – children.

We don’t expect sugary fairy tales from the director of Funny Games and Hidden. Yet The White Ribbon, shot in an eerie, glacial monochrome, is a kind of fairytale: or the negative image of one, where people move in a show of purity and virtue against skies of black deeds. Mysterious atrocities happen, from a doctor falling from his horse to unattributable beatings and unexplained suicides, in this hamlet where the “old ways” are put on trial by Haneke over a patient, novelistic, mesmerising 137 minutes.

Religion gets the fiercest cross-examination. The village pastor (Burghart Klaussner) is a disciplinarian ready with a token of shame – the titular white ribbon – for each of his children who errs. Another village boy, in another scene, walks the high strut of a wooden bridge, afterwards pronouncing aloud: “I gave God a chance to kill me.” Everywhere, a generation brought up by pious or authoritarian elders pours its reverence, and its unwitting reserves of resentment, into a Father figure sculpted in odious, obscurantist mystery.

Haneke presents his story, or stories, with a studied detachment that suggests a class in human sciences – the intermittent voice-off narration is by the village schoolteacher – while also intimating a viral uncertainty about the nature of every deed. Who is to blame for this world of layered and lurking hatred, where even the accident-recovered doctor can spit sudden loathing at his mistress, or where a housekeeper answers a child’s simple question, “Does everyone die?” with a harshly direct and simple “Yes”.

We learn that the youngsters themselves may have perpetrated the mass of the atrocities. But in a world where people have learnt for generations to lay down their minds and souls on sacrificial altars to authority figures, temporal or spiritual, creditable or spurious, it seems possible to argue – and Haneke surely does – that none is without guilt just as none, in this world of paradox and perplexity, is quite without innocence.

Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) is an apocalypse chef. In 2012 () he cooks America till it boils, adding live meat (John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, President Danny Glover) to the process at judicious intervals.

Stupendous exercise: ‘2012’

After that, citing solar flares, nuclear neutrinos and the Mayan calendar – which apparently ends three years from now – this stupendous Armageddon exercise marinades the rest of the world in mega-tsunamis. Forget the London Olympics: they will be a literal washout. Say goodbye to Europe, Australasia and most of Asia.

Visually the film is thrilling. In Los Angeles the streets bubble like lasagne; in Las Vegas the billion-dollar hotels, those blocks of costly cheesiness, are thrown into the fondue. Sonically, 2012 is no less awesome, with boom-channel bombardments to your tympanum and shaking seats. Dramatically – we cannot expect everything – it is business as usual: decoratively yelping females, alpha males discovering their omegas (or vice versa) and dialogue perversely enjoyable even when it reaches deep into kitsch or bathos.

A cussed cockney crock with a vengeance mission, living on a British housing estate. Which actor-knight do we get to play that? It must be Michael Caine. In Harry Brown (, Daniel Barber) he has his most rabidly satisfying role since Get Carter: a “vigilante pensioner” up against the boyz ’n’ the hoodies.

Face of wonder: Michael Caine in ‘Harry Brown’

Caine’s face, filmed like the rest of the movie in bleak desaturated colours, is a wonder. On this blank and chalky wall outrage writes its graffiti. These proliferate as first a pensioner pal (David Bradley) is killed – a fellow war veteran – and later Harry makes himself the target of violence, Death Wish-style, the better to line the oiks in his sights. The film has fatuities. The chief detective is played by Emily Mortimer – bimbo casting, though Mortimer is superior bimbodom – and the youthful villain demographic, plus the prompts to our indignation, come straight from the UK tabloids. But before it spins into terminal hokum, Barber’s feature debut has moments of power and menace.

Tulpan (), a weirdly magical debut from Kazakhstan’s Sergei Dvortsevoy, won the main sideshow prize at Cannes last year. On a dust-swirled steppe a tent-dwelling family tries to marry off a young uncle, demobbed from the navy, to a neighbouring girl who keeps saying no. Brideless, the chap has no hope of qualifying for the land plus sheep-flock he can claim from Comrade Boss, the local relic of Soviet power.

Weirdly magical: ‘Tulpan’

On an epic screen, life unspools like a giant thread teased from a tapestry. Twisters vortex on the skyline; lambs die from malnutrition; angry camels get, in every sense, the hump. (Hell has no fury like a dromedary whose baby is forcibly removed by the intinerant vet.) The central family has rowdy children, a tyrannical dad and a daughter who banshees folk songs louder than Shirley Bassey. The film is irresistibly human and funny, and properly momentous when calamity strikes.

Even a Kazakh yurt, by now, probably has access to the internet. We Live in Public () is a documentary about one of the lifeforms that scuttled about the web in its early history.

Horribly compelling: ‘We Live in Public’

Josh Harris was an eccentric millionaire and surveillance-culture artist. Ondi Timoner’s film, which won the Sundance Grand Prix, is horribly compelling: an up-close look both at Harris’s experiments – including the underground commune in New York that licensed libertine living for the price of round-the-clock recording of every resident’s every act – and at Harris himself. An evident monomaniac, crazed of eye and deep of pallor, he started with the Midas touch and ended with the pariah’s purse. His fortune vanished and so did he, though Timoner eventually discovers him struggling to refind life and meaning by teaching basketball to children in Ethiopia. The moral? There probably isn’t one: just another bizarre, bewitching tale from those that make up life in, on and around the worldwide web.

Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock () is a damp squib, thrown fizzling into the memory arena of the world’s pioneer rock festival.

Rock nostalgia: ‘Taking Woodstock’

The domestic scenes (British actors Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman in Yiddisher overdrive) have all the brio missing from the rock-fest scenes. These are wet, straggly and vapid, like an add-water-and-grow packet of Flower Power memories. The film is surely a case of director miscasting. The maker of The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain is too sympathetic to the liberal revolution – too much a happy vassal of its values – to give the film the fight, bite and contrariness it needed.

Woodstock memoirist and co-founder Elliott Tiber is lightly fictionalised as the film’s hero, a gay Jewish momma and poppa’s boy (Demetri Martin) with the history-making idea of hiring out his family’s land.

The week’s true biopic-for-the-bin, though, is Amelia (, Mira Nair).

Wigged out: Hilary Swank in ‘Amelia’

Woodenly acted and grinningly bland, this Amelia Earhart life story turns Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, playing the aviatrix’s publisher husband, into virtual Thunderbirds puppets, illuminated by early-century celebrity and (the movie’s idea of) history. Poor Swank, especially, is reduced to little more than an unprepossessing Earhart wig, from which are suspended the living remains of a two-time Oscar winner.