Lee Marshall

The Lighthouse provides a marvellous chamber-drama platform for two actors, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who seize the opportunity with gusto.

Klondike is both despairing – sometimes in a blackly comic vein – and empathetic in the way it sees the incident from the ground up rather than from the sky down.

Much credit too must go the actors, all non-professionals who were discovered by the director via community meetings and theatre workshops. There’s no Brechtian alienation here: these are committed yet unmannered performances that help to flesh out what might otherwise be a thin story.

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

Lovingly shot in warm natural light, and accompanied by a gentle, lilting soundtrack, Holy Cow is shot through with compassion for its rascally yet vulnerable protagonist.

This is an atmospherically shot film about African oral culture, about riots, street musicians and storytellers. But it also uses the space and denizens of the prison as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions within Ivorian society.

Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.

It’s a tragedy of sorts, one that at times is almost too dark to bear. But there are moments too when Hold Me Tight achieves something quite remarkable, blurring the line between reality and imaginings to burrow into the heart of grief and loss in ways that are also life-affirming.

An angry skewering of today’s gig economy as well as a moving drama about a loving family on the verge of implosion which is easily is one of Loach’s very best films.

Nobody is quite perfect here, nobody fully the villain; and as our suspicions wax and wane about Rahim himself, we, the audience, become the emotional repositories of these constantly shifting grey areas.

Francois Ozon’s adaptation is at its best when it sticks to the letter and tone of Camus’ enduring, enigmatic novella.

A genuine, likeable, loose-limbed buddy dramedy about impending death.

Melodrama is a neglected genre, often delivered with a post-modern twist these days. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz proves in this stirring, heart-wrenching period film that it can be served straight up and still work a treat.

It’s tribute to Mungiu’s bravura as a writer and director that, despite the fact that he never quite finishes unpacking a suitcase full of themes and ideas, R.M.N. is never less than an absorbing watch.

It’s a film that rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

Writer-director Glasner’s control of tone in a potential misery fest that – believe it or not – contains a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments is pitch perfect, most of the time.

An engaging, authentic, moving film about the way society persists in seeing monsters where there are none.

In its austere way, this is classic Wiseman, a film that takes us into the heart of a community and reveals its inner workings, comforts, fractures and traumas. It’s also a fine example of the way the director sculpts and moulds his material to create an arc that is both dramatic and poetic.

A film that is a small delight, a perfect cinematic short story.

Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.

Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive vision and that is the case here, even if The Ice Tower, which bows in Berlin Competition, is her biggest film to date; utterly beautiful in every frame with a breakout lead performance by young French actress Clara Pacini.

The main thing with a rousing cinematic experience like Architecton is that it wins the emotional argument.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

The writer-director’s evident anger is tempered and fragmented by both fatalism, games of truth and lies, self-doubt and frequent reminders, in this Biblical landscape, of the historical and geological long view. Ahed’s Knee also works, perhaps surprisingly, as a drama that crackles with a never-consumed sexual energy.

This taut, accomplished film recounts a dark episode in Guatemala’s history as a suspense-laden ghost story based on a myth deeply rooted in indigenous Latin American culture.

It’s the shocking disjunct between his religion and the rabid nationalism of his sermons, writings and declarations that powers Schroeder’s conventional but nevertheless effective long hard stare into the eyes of intolerance.

In the end, there’s something just a little too neatly constructed about Monster, something just a little trite about the message delivered after so many narrative twists and turns. Yet there is an emotional delicacy here too that keeps sentiment at bay, at least most of the time.