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.

One of those thrillers that sets itself some tricky problems early on and fails to successfully solve them later, Daniel Calparsoro’s math-based The Warning nevertheless knows exactly which buttons to press, and is an enjoyably undemanding ride for most of its length.

Skin plays out with the clarity, simplicity, rawness and grim poetry of a folk tale, tackling on the way some pretty elemental themes, but it’s a tale as told by a very dull speaker. By the end, viewer sensations are mixed, with pleasure at having entered a strange new world, but also frustration at its sheer lack of drama.

This story about the reunion, following a 35-year abandonment, of a mother and daughter, marvelously played by Spanish actors Susi Sanchez and Barbara Lennie, respectively, is slow but never ponderous, clear in its outlines but never simplistic, and elegantly crafted without being stifling.

The real horror in Veronica is not in the CGI visuals, or in Pablo Rosso's frantic cinematography, or in the aural bombardment of sound effects and music; it’s in the relationship between the children.

Offering a refreshingly low-key take on an idea that could too easily have become strident, noisy and melodramatic, the virtues of Carlos Lechuga’s second feature are the quiet, human ones, the script carefully and respectfully training its gaze on two unwilling outsiders struggling to live a life that the system has stolen from them.

Raw, intriguing and energetic despite its flaws, the film fades in dramatic power over its final stretch and doesn’t always do justice to the the potential richness of its subject, but until then, it makes for an authentic, distinctive and watchable blend of the tough and the tender.

Though the script is pretty good on depicting the broken dreams that strew the path of the wannabe actor, its scope reaches wider, making it a timely portrayal (immigration, Brexit) on the multiple frustrations of being a stranger in a strange land, even when that stranger is as bourgeois as they come.

There's a nicely rendered sense of aesthetics, whether it’s in the safe pastel shades which fill Bea’s bedroom and which contrast with the high, sharp tones of the fantasy scenes.

One of the most unsettling things about Queen is how awkwardly it tackles all this painful, historical material: it’s as though Trueba’s script knows that homage must be paid to it, but it feels shoehorned in.

This tale of a young linguist seeking to keep a dying language alive is thought-provoking, visually compelling, and hopefully will help to raise awareness about this indirect form of cultural destruction. But its themes are subordinated to surprisingly bland treatment

Buoyed by Andre Horta’s often documentary-style camerawork, the script is respectful of the truth, refusing to exaggerate for the sake of the drama even when there are multiple opportunities to do so.

It’s Gay’s most emotionally direct work to date, thoroughly shedding the clever-cleverness of some of his earlier work, and also his most accessible — a clean-lined, sensitively-written and beautifully played two-hander that tackles complex issues in a refreshingly straightforward, downbeat way.

Childhood memoirs always are under threat from self-indulgence and sentimentality, but 1993 successfully sidesteps both, establishing Simon as a talent to watch.

As homage, the film is visually striking, littered with moments of real cinematographic intelligence, and always watchable, in a nasty sort of way, but as a thriller, its ambitions of intensity are thwarted by a plot which becomes increasingly out-there as the twists and turns pile up.

It’s an impressive backdrop to what’s otherwise a polished period piece without much of a bite to it, hitting all the right notes but doing nothing that feels exciting or out of the ordinary.

Despite his clear interest in matters philosophical, Veiroj has a built-in anti-pomp detector and The Apostate, with its winsomely shambling central character, is always deft, engaging and teeming with ideas.

Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible.

Although nothing here quite matches the moving, life-in-five-minutes montage in Pixar’s “Up,” one swooping flashback sequence comes very close.

Lively, entertaining and well made, pic is thankfully neither mawkish nor grueling, though its refusal to confront some of the harsher realities of its dramatic situation does leave it feeling somewhat bland.

Longtime Pedro Almodovar followers who have secretly been hankering for a return to the broad, transgressive comedy of his early work will be thrilled by I’m So Excited, a hugely entertaining, feelgood celebration of human sexuality that unfolds as a cathartic experience for characters, audiences and helmer alike.

Though it slickly offers up drama, black comedy and enjoyable performances in due measure, the picture never develops much bite, though it does bare its fangs.

A quietly devastating exploration of the cruel paradox that, in order to feed their loved ones, emigrants have to leave them behind.

A perceptive, ultra-wordy stab at catching the zeitgeist at a time of change in Spain, David Trueba's two-hander nonetheless feels like a working-out of social and personal themes that hasn't quite achieved the full leap from page to film.

Iciar Bollain's fifth feature is her most ambitious and best, driving its big ideas home through a tightly knit Paul Laverty script that only falters over the final reel.

This loosely-structured pic feels authentic, its underdramatized script resolutely nonjudgmental.

Lightness of touch, vibrant performances and a sharp script are the hallmarks of this delightful femme comedy.

Somewhat wacky tale, based on real events, is kept anchored in reality through attention to detail and by first-rate central perfs.

A deeply rewarding throwback to the unself-conscious days when cinema still strove to be magical, The Secrets in their Eyes is simply mesmerizing.

A solidly-built but somewhat airless debut from the assistant director of "The Motorcycle Diaries."

An all-or-nothing perf from old DiCillo hand Steve Buscemi and a script that leaves no ironical stone unturned make this laugh-out-loud fare.

A nicely contempo mood, engaging characters energized by solid perfs from a good-looking, high-profile young cast, and genuinely witty scripting are let down only by over-length and some generally turgid tunes.

A slickly made, intense and powerfully visual take on time-honored problems such as identity and the body's power over the mind.

Studded with moments of character-driven charm, with sparky 6-year-old Marina Pastor a particular joy to watch.

Superbly orchestrated, visually impressive.

Peopled with superbly drawn, attractive characters smoothly integrated into a well-turned, low-tricks plotline, Volver may rep Almodovar's most conventional piece to date, but it is also his most reflective, a subdued, sometimes intense and often comic homecoming that celebrates the pueblo and people that shaped his imagination.

Timecrimes welds a B-movie plotline to precision-engineered writing and a down-to-earth style; add an engagingly sloppy, nonplussed hero, who remains unfazed by the time-bending scrape in which he finds himself, and the result is memorably offbeat.

A tough-but-tender movie driven by perfectly modulated performances, an accomplished script and naturalistic dialogue, all at the service of an oft-told message about overcoming circumstances.

A lively, well-packaged but meaningless amusement.

A restless, rangy and frankly enjoyable genre-juggler that combines melodrama, comedy and more noir-hued darkness than ever before, the picture is held together by the extraordinary force of Almodovar’s cinematic personality.

Predictable fare that only occasionally fulfils its intention of being simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening.

A brave but doomed attempt to revive the art of pure physical comedy, the willfully eccentric, practically dialogue-free, Iceberg sets itself a high standard with an opening 15 minutes of the most delicious slapstick, but thereafter only a few moments of gentle surrealism and the occasional poetic image justify the ride, with only 10% of the pic's potential laughs evident above the surface.

As neatly tailored, clean-cut, and visually appealing as a Savile Row suit. But audiences accustomed to more knowing fare are likely to find its twists and turns outdated while yearning for a little of the rebellious fun that made the genre gleam in the first place.

A general lack of drama, a low-budget documentary feel and an ultraslim storyline are more than compensated for by a sterling script and performances.

A deft, witty and emotionally rewarding study of a thirtysomething man in his roles as father and son.

A dramatic triumph.

The surprisingly watchable delight strikes universal chords.

Taking a seed of an idea and nurturing it into a fable about moral hypocrisy, Bearcub substantiates prolific Spanish helmer Miguel Albaladejo's rep for well-observed, character-based dramas with an offbeat twist and a potent emotional undertow.

The Aura is far from being simply "Nine Queens2." Leisurely paced, studied, reticent and rural, The Aura is a quieter, richer and better-looking piece that handles its multiple manipulations with the maturity the earlier picture sometimes lacked.

Though pic boasts decent perfs, potent atmospherics and eye-catching visuals, both psychology and plot are bargain-basement.

The pluses outweigh the minuses: Pic is thought-provoking, visuals are spot-on, and the heavy-duty cast pulls the film round even in its wobblier moments.

Jaw-dropping, sumptuous visuals, a lush George Fenton score, state-of-the-art technology and some of the oddest creatures ever seen without recourse to artificial stimulants.

An uneven but exuberantly anarchic comedy homage to the spaghetti Western.

Picture has more in common with standard child-parent conflict dramas than it would probably care to admit, but its sensitive treatment of an equally sensitive theme elevates it into something memorable.

Ambitious script is stranded between entertainment and intellectualism, leaving us with a magnificent folly, thoroughly watchable for its visuals but ultimately hollow.

Handles the subject of domestic violence with intelligence and compassion.

Though it fails in its final reels to capitalize on its early promise, picture is still stylish, accomplished and tremendously enjoyable fare.

Sarah Polley gives a wonderfully searching performance, as a woman in a state of extreme isolation, in The Secret Life of Words, a compellingly claustrophobic drama set mostly aboard an oil rig.

The stellar cast can do little to paper over the cracks in an awkward, unevenly-paced script that is composed of a series of sometimes-attractive scenes with little emotional undertow.

A watchable if none-too-penetrating analysis of the traumatizing effects of a war largely forgotten.

The whole project breathes an air of sincerity and vitality that renders large sections of it instantly likable.