Deborah Young

A delightfully unpredictable sleeper that proves new Argentine cinema really exists, Suddenly, by 26-year-old Diego Lerman, starts scary, moves through deadpan comic and comes out with a whimsical tenderness for its characters.

Gianfranco Rosi (Below Sea Level, El Sicario: Room 164) brings humor and sensitivity to his filming of the strange denizens who live and work around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s huge ring road.

It’s a smart film with engaging moments. But working overtime to build an involving multi-layered drama with a flurry of hand-held camera movements and dizzying flashbacks, it ultimately turns repetitive and annoying.

Despite its paucity of action and some unnecessary repetitions that extend the running time, the story rolls on smoothly.

Likeable if unexciting little tale.

An intellectually rigorous but stylistically staid peep at the 20-something author of Capital and The Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is at once historically impeccable and a filmic disappointment.

Film has major assets in Walter Carvalho's stunning landscapes and livewire young lead Hermila Guedes, but overall, it's too uninvolving.

The story-telling is a little too pat to deliver the surprise moments that reveal character or sweep audiences up emotionally. The film remains a creepy story with a lot of morbid fascination, set off by the captivating young Florencia Bado in her first screen role.

American Dharma is meant to leave its audience shaken, whatever side they’re on.

Sentimentality and pathos are banned from Hikari’s screenplay, which surprises with its fresh, often humorous realism. This is one of those films that starts slowly and predictably, but when the turning point comes, it lifts the pic into another dimension.

Director Hrvoje Hribar gives a lively professional look to this good-humored film.

A film whose lightness of touch rides a wave of family conflict to perfectly balance smiles and tears.

The film has humanity to burn, but its loose structure makes it hard to connect with the multiple characters.

The winking, rather perverse sexual chemistry between the two charismatic lead actresses, who play sisters (though not twins), is one of the film’s main attractions. But Trapero’s ambitious attempt to strike a unique tone somewhere between serious drama and humorous daytime TV falls awkwardly flat.

It is saved by its underlying theme of forgiveness and reconciliation between long-estranged family members, for whom the cruel memory of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Singapore during World War 2 is still alive.

Hits its stride from the opening scenes and continues hilariously for a while, before declining into more of same. Its undeniable appeal lies in shocking frankness shackled to irony, a combo that should attract indie lovers with psychoanalytic leanings and droll senses of humor.

This film of delicate emotional nuance recounts an enchanting but sad love story.

Precious little is revealed and one is left with the feeling that the material needed a different kind of treatment to illuminate its protagonists.

The special effects are quality fun, the humor only a little Japanese, and the story boasts the offbeat genre twists Miike lovers clamber for.

Though convincingly set in the lower depths of Lima, the story embodies a universal truth about the experience of former soldiers in many times and places.

A sober, thought-provoking response to a tragedy of worldwide import and a much better film than one might expect from the pre-release publicity.

More than a thriller, this adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel The Double is an absurdist-existential mood piece – and a very dark mood it is.

The central performances by Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff hold the film together with the intensity of their brotherly affection and support.

Salma Hayek makes the character an icon of female independence, courage and nonconformity, forecasting special appeal for women viewers.

The story of Mohamed, who leaves behind his normal life for the money and excitement of piracy, is illuminating, even if he is never a terribly sympathetic character that the viewer can warm up to.

The conflict is pretty obvious and the film’s naturalistic shooting style can’t take it to another symbolic level, so as drama, what you see is what you get.

Shot like the grunge version of a '50s noir thriller from France (or Soviet Georgia), the black-and-white 13 (Tzameti) turns into a shocker of Tarantino proportions in protracted sequences of explosive violence that leave viewers quaking.

Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.