Ed Frankl

This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.

For all its social-realist tendencies, A Chiara is told in a wonderfully fluid and poetic fashion.

Bispuri challenges us to do away with conventional notions of what a perfect mother should be.

Quemada-Díez filmed The Golden Dream chronologically using natural light and real locations, utilising Super 16 film to give his first feature a documentary shimmer. He also worked as a camera operator on Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003), with whom he shares his penchant for opulent landscapes and narratives, and a sense of beauty amidst unforgiving reality.

Garrel has the touch of a wiser man not taking judgment on his characters’ youthful foibles, where setbacks are to be embraced and learned from rather than experiences discarded from memory.

This is a film that stages itself in non-linear narratives, in severe, clinical long takes, in metaphorical observations, and even extended sequences of Shakespearean re-enactment–a film whose aesthetics may be intensely controlled and yet whose narrative is sprawling with meanings and readings.

Kelly’s earnest, reportedly auto-biographical film has a lot of laughs and is best when it’s most deeply personal.

Boyle’s verve as a director means there’s still plenty of vibrant imagery, alongside a script that, although lacking any of the electricity of the original’s state-of-the-nation wisecracks (“Scotland is a nation colonized by wankers”), is funny and disarmingly melancholic.

For the most part, Dinosaur 13 is highly absorbing - some of the decisions that come against Larson are truly shocking - but it does lack in places as a piece of documentary journalism.

The archival footage gives a time capsule—not just of the sound and styles of the ’60s and ’70s, but a whole society dragged out of Italy’s countryside and into the rapidly industrialized cities.

Øvredal gives us B-movie thrills better than most of his peers, creating a campy, nasty, tremendously fun horror experience in which death proves not the ending we might expect.

The surprise winner of the Berlinale’s Golden Bear is a film not easily summed up in an elevator pitch. It is, however, a studious, intelligent, if flawed and scattershot, work with an open mind about modern sexuality and intimacy. That open mind will need to be replicated in the audience too.

It’s a spiritual, ambiguously plotted journey through the Atlas Mountains, and those willing to give in to its mystical embrace and gorgeous visuals should find it a sensual, engrossing watch.

Mifune: The Last Samurai, the well-assembled documentary on the life of actor Toshirô Mifune, the long-time Akira Kurosawa collaborator, should be a worthy introduction to one of Japanese cinema’s greatest icons, if a little light on more revelatory findings.

Nothing quite competes with the blistering opening scene, but The Salvation's cast of characters mean it's never less than a fun watch.

A sterile arthouse drama that rather muddles its conceit. ... Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard never really get to grips with the potential for psychological terror at the center of what remains a genuinely intriguing premise.

The final third, especially, is by-the-numbers plotting. It’s a pity, as the film starts off promising some interesting overarching themes, especially Sibyl’s underhand ethics of mining her psychological examinations for fiction. As a metaphor for artistic invention, it’s an interesting, but unsuccessful one.

Even if Murdoch's directorial style is at times off-putting - the dance routines oscillating wildly from charming to naff - it's hard not to be taken in by trips into Glasgow's backstreet gig venues and the type of Victorian splendour seen on screen too rarely.

It feels more that Gemma Bovery goes through the motions of the novel, restricted by its own pretensions to meet high-brow literature.

The dark heart of In the Courtyard makes its comedy ever more piquant, while Deneuve and Kervern are exceptional as two lonely souls finding solace in each other's company during the twilight years of their lives.

When push comes to shove, A Walk Among the Tombstones carries its B-movie thrills with aplomb.

Gerard Johnson's sophomore feature might look on the outset like the type of London crime thriller usually populated by Jason Statham, but it's more emotionally complex than its outset gives it credit for.

Little Accidents may be a little too sober, lacking the occasional spark that would make it more than just a film about moral decision points - but it's a likable small-town drama all the same.

Carried by two accomplished performance, and despite a tight 87-minute running time, this is a rich saga, bathed in atmosphere that disturbs as much as it engrosses.

Folman is best in the family-entertainment mode when he’s breathing visual life into Anne’s flights of imagination.

Xavier Beauvois has made a film that contemplates trauma of one’s own making, a perceptive work that grapples with guilt and grief.

Its narrative might reach cliché towards the end, but powerful performances carry this fine fable of the American Dream lost in heartbreak.

It’s only frustrating that however funny Fundamentals is, the dynamic is something we’ve seen many times before.