Jonathan Holland

Shot from inside its community, Rocks is more than simply a polemic, though, and is careful to root its message in sequences of day-to-day reality.

Little Amelie is, despite occasional inevitable lapses into sentimentality, visually engrossing and thought-provoking fare that ranges daringly across emotions ranging from pure delight to fear and horror.

Challenging on practically all levels – and yoking together ideas from Chile’s history, the occult, right-wing conspiracy theory, Jungian psychology, silent film and elsewhere – directors Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina pull it all together by virtue of their mastery of technique.

The multiple scenes featuring family fights feel raw and authentic, sometimes painfully so, because they seem part-improvised: but at times they drag on too long, a sign of a larger problem with pacing and rhythm. What brings it all back from the edge are the performances.

The perpetual undercurrent of tension between them always feels plausible and is well-rendered by Arana and Sanz, who co-wrote the script. Amongst all the glancing ironies and wit, time also is thankfully also found for a little old-fashioned tenderness.

How does where we are from impact on the kind of love we feel? López Riera’s answer, which can be summed up as boy meets girls meets magical realism meets women’s solidarity, is both intimate and ambitious in scope, thought-provoking and emotionally engaging.

Balanced on the tightrope between comedy and pathos, the precision-tooled Mamacruz is essentially a sensitively observed character study, with Spanish veteran Kiti Manver delivering a compelling, nuanced central performance as a religiously-repressed woman in late middle age who comes late – in all senses – to the transformative power of her own sensuality.

Ramona is both wonderful and appalling, and Vazquez’s edgy performance drags us entirely into her relentless, thoughtless world, with her flaming red hair, her smoker’s cough, her gravelly tones and her unfailing ability to bring joy and despair to those around her.

[An] unusually direct, moving and deceptively simple exploration of love – and of film – as defences against forgetting.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

Enjoyably over-the-top, well-played and in some passages an homage to those acid, preposterous Ealing comedies, Weasel Tale’s script cleverly pits two kinds of actors against one another — traditional movie star vs entrepreneurial whiz kid — to see who comes out on top, and the result is often sharp, funny and never dull, though it could have shed about 20 minutes.

Gripping, intense and often very moving, The Endless Trench pulls together details from some of the jaw-dropping accounts of these lifelong nightmares, recasting the hidden history of a so-called “mole” and of his endlessly suffering wife as a profoundly involving, superbly played story about love as protection from fear.

Fusing Grimm, the early shorts of David Lynch and the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer into a visually engrossing, reference-rich and disturbing tale about the mental delirium of a young girl, the deeply uncanny pic makes for an unsettling viewing experience, a creative tour de force whose endlessly fascinating visuals are deliberately seductive and repellent in equal measure.

Ambitious in scope, carefully crafted and featuring several fine performances ... But despite the worthy seriousness of its intentions and the parallels with the present it cleverly draws at every turn, the final impression is of dramatic opportunities left unexplored. While War’s dutiful sense of responsibility to its source material is laudable, it feels limiting.

Bunuel is above all a good story elegantly told.

Smart, good-looking and buzzing with edginess, Sama's fourth feature has been made with a love and care that's palpable in every frame, allowing us to forgive its occasional, inevitable brushes with cliche.

Its dispassionate approach toward the major injustices and minuscule triumphs that make up the life of its protagonist, superbly played by Gabriela Cartol, is always balanced by compassion, perhaps making it more effective than any impassioned rant.

It cannily draws its various strands together into a visually striking piece of rare immediacy and power.

Although it's enjoyable to make the acquaintance of the well-played, crowd-pleasing Strangers, the encounter is quickly forgotten.

On the surface it is indeed a gentle, well-mannered and elegant affair, but its caustic undertow, which becomes increasingly apparent, ends up making the viewer angry about a world that seems hell-bent on finding divisions where there need be none.

Driven by a cracklingly energetic, committed performance by Sofia Gala Castiglione (more commonly known in Argentina as Sofia Gala) as a character whom we very quickly start to care about, events come at the viewer entirely through the heroine’s dislocating perspective, making the film a viewing experience of great immediacy, one with the rare capacity to dislodge prejudice.

Located somewhere between family drama and social crit, the quiet but intense Life stands out mainly for the compelling naturalism of its non-pro performances and for a script which teeters dangerously on the edge of preachiness without falling in.

What viewers take away from Kids is the sense that even after 80 years of hard living, it’s still possible to live a meaningful, happy and influential existence — an authentically feel-good message for these feel-bad times.

Though it is intermittently witty, visually playful and laudable in its attempt to appeal to both head and heart, Laws abandons its characters to its big concept.

Its subversive undercurrent, embodied in fine performances by Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy, is what makes it really interesting.

A high-risk shot at a screen adaptation of a novel within a novel, The Motive is entertaining and buzzes with fun ideas, but as an involving drama, it never gets past the first chapter.

Partly a visually stunning celebration of nature and partly a record of Diaz’s triumphs and trials, both practical and psychological, Days, which takes its titular cue (and nothing else) from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, aims at reconsideration of our relationship with nature and our place in it and, despite going overboard on the grandiose drone images, mainly does so in a winningly down-to-earth way.