Sally Campbell

Lore begins at the moment the German war effort collapsed in spring 1945 and US, Russian and British forces swept across the land.

Lore, a girl of about 13, must take charge of her four younger siblings after their Nazi parents are imprisoned. They are the privileged children of a top SS officer, born and raised under Hitler's regime and benefiting from it as other children suffered. Now they must travel alone some 500 miles from Bavaria to their grandmother's house near Hamburg.

Angela Carter once wrote an essay called "Alison's Giggle", which was about the changing representations of women's sexuality in literature. Alison was the carpenter's wife in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale, written at the end of the 14th century. She finds her husband repulsive and has taken another lover. She humiliates the older and rather ridiculous carpenter by tricking him into kissing her arse. "Tee hee, said she", Chaucer writes, showing Alison's glee as she returns to her lover.

We live in a time of contradiction. There are more women in positions of power than ever before, yet attitudes to women seem to be going backwards. Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany, a country debating imposing a quota for women in the boardrooms. Yet the head of Deutsche Bank, when asked if he supported the proposal, said yes, of course - women would make boardrooms "more colourful and prettier".

Let Me In ticks three boxes which put it firmly at the top of the "current trends" pile.

Firstly, it's a film about young people, one of whom is a vampire. Thankfully these are not the tortured teenagers of the Twilight saga, whose petulant faces give me a whole new insight into why my mum didn't take me seriously when I was 15. Our protagonists are 12 year olds ("or thereabouts", in the case of Abby, the vampire). This is a much less examined age, a precipice between childhood and full-on adolescence.

This was Raquel Welch's response on CNN to this month's fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the pill in the US. Her somewhat internally contradictory argument (she loves marriage so much, she's done it four times!) is that the advent of oral contraception has led to the breakdown of "family values" and rampant promiscuity. She is not alone in putting that case. Tory politicians such as Iain Duncan Smith have argued against making contraception more available to girls, paradoxically claiming it will lead to higher teenage pregnancy rates.

What do you think about the first year of Barack Obama's presidency?

I didn't share the excitement and the enthusiasm that a lot of my colleagues on the left had about Obama. I distinguish his actions from the symbolism of his being elected.

I can't recall the last film I saw in which the lead character was a middle-aged, ordinary-looking, working class woman with mental health issues. That she is also an artist and a real person makes this story rare indeed.

Yolande Moreau plays Séraphine Louis (known as Séraphine de Senlis - the French town in which she lived and worked), a cleaning woman and an artist "discovered" in 1912 when she was already nearly 50.

The White Ribbon is an utterly convincing and absorbing portrait of a small north German village in the 15 months running up to the First World War. Nasty incidents begin to occur, and it seems there is an "enemy within" disrupting the harmony of the village. Taking his time and with absolute precision Haneke builds up a set of characters ranged in almost feudal relationships with each other: the baron, the doctor, the pastor, the schoolteacher, the farmer.

Pedro Almodovar's latest film, Broken Embraces, is a self-referential meditation on filmmaking starring his muse, Penelope Cruz, and dealing in all the melodrama, sex and death that we have come to expect (and love) from the Spanish master.

On the surface this can seem a reasonable point.

Oppression doesn't mirror class but cuts across it. All women suffer from sexism, whether an Indonesian factory worker or a highly paid (though not as highly paid as her male counterparts) London City trader. A factory worker's experience of her oppression, however, is very different to that of a rich woman.