Between the summer blockbuster season and the Christmas holiday season, there's the period that we at the Fridae Movie Club prefer to call "film festival season" where you'd not just have film festivals running but also commercial cinemas releasing more experimental or niche films.

Our pick for this week is The Secrets, which airs this Friday at The Cathay for this year's Israeli Film Festival. A twist on the boarding-house-with-mild-sapphic-undertones flick, this film is set in a religious seminary for girls in an ultra-orthodox Jewish enclave where feminism and women's liberation is beginning to make an inroad.

The Woman in the Fifth is a crime thriller about a former professor and literary figure (played by Ethan Hawke) stuck in a dead-end job in the Parisian underworld. Will he clear his name, get back his job and his family? Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, the film is also a beautiful but disturbing psychological drama and mood piece.

The sheer insanity and comic genius of Seth MacFarlane (The Family Guy) is on display in Ted, a fantastic bromance about a man (Mark Wahlberg) who never grew up and his walking, talking teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane), and Seth MacFarlane's penchant for making endless jokes informed by 70s and 80s pop culture.

In animation film Wolf Children, a young widow is forced to move to hardscrabble countryside with her pair of toddlers. Will she survive the coming winter? Will the children turn out all right? Will everyone find their way in life? And oh, this anime is called Wolf Children because... she married a wolf-man once!

With all the Korean cinematic conventions of a corrupt and inept police force, it's not surprising that a film like The Scent got made eventually. It's a classic noir and a parody of classic noirs where a gumshoe detective gets into a case too big for his shoes and has to solve the mystery before the real killer, the corrupt and inept police force, or the ravishingly beautiful femme fatale do him in.

Over at The Substation this weekend, the 5th Singapore Indie Doc Fest will conclude with a study in gender identity within the cultural mosaic of the world's largest Muslim community — Wariazone, a documentary which brings us to Indonesia to look at the lives of MTF transgenders and crossdressing performing artists across the archipelago.

Till next week,

Vernon Chan