Neil Young

While there is no doubting the filmmakers’ admirably humanistic and progressive intentions, however, the picture itself somehow ends up less than the sum of its often-impressive parts.

A likeably offbeat and disarmingly self-aware documentary essay on how humans deal with the immutable transience of the universe, Ian Cheney’s globetrotting Arc Of Oblivion should leave a trace in the minds of receptive viewers.

Very much a collaborative affair between subject Apolonia Sokol and Danish filmmaker Lea Glob, it also functions as a snapshot of millennial creatives and their struggles to balance public and private lives amid external financial and psychological pressures.

It is a film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.

The result is an engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected; the various sections of the film are divided by ruminative fades to black.

It’s an offbeat combination of erudite esoterica and sensory pleasures (many of them music-related) that patient viewers may find beguiling.

Using simple means, Kang and his team take banal situations and settings — much of the action unfolds in a city-centre apartment building — and render them just eerie enough to be unsettling.

Matter Out Of Place is a typically sober, observational and engrossing work of ecological-anthropological documentary from Austrian maestro Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

The structure of The Plains is playful and idiosyncratic, rather than formalist or rigid.

It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

A pleasant and sometimes stimulating viewing experience.

Rising like Olympus above the general run of low-budget debut features, Israeli writer-director Oren Gerner’s Africa is a touchingly well-observed study of long-time marrieds starring the filmmaker’s own parents as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Herrero Garvin and company have evidently earned the trust of Dona Olga and her customers, their film winningly emerging as warm, humanistic evocation of sisterhood against a fascinating demi-monde backdrop.

If nothing else, the period picture represents an impressive change of pace from Ostrochovsky’s hard-knock feature directorial debut.

It’s a deliciously rug-pulling affair which, like the “catfishing” protagonist — i.e. a person hiding behind a fake online persona for deceitful purposes — comes across as one thing and gradually reveals itself to be quite another.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

The most sympathetic, illuminating study of domestic labor since Roma.

Of obvious interest to arthouse audiences in Cullen, Wright and Jensen's native Australia, this ambitious and stimulating glimpse into the dark abyss of creativity deserves widespread international exposure at festivals and via receptive theatrical settings.

It's an unassuming and delicate work which demands but ultimately repays close attention.

Rocky roads to romance, self-realization and adulthood are quirkily mapped in Take Me Somewhere Nice, a distinctive and ultimately quite promising debut by Bosnian-born Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

A shaggy-seeming but carefully modulated affair, To the Ends of the Earth gradually emerges as an offbeat but persuasive investigation of culture-clashes and the potential for trans-global bridge-building.

Punctuated with moments of illumination, humor and even occasional visual flair —the opening shot executes a stately 360-degree cityscape pan from a high crane — Present. Perfect manages to retain interest despite a certain repetitiveness and some patience-taxing longueurs.

An undeniably demanding but cumulatively rewarding mood piece.

A pleasant, if in the end slightly inconsequential picture, perhaps primarily of interest to those currently experiencing Mullins-style sibling frictions and joys, those who have fresh memories of the same and ethnographers/anthropologists keen to see how some of the world's most economically fortunate minors currently make the ever-rocky transition from youth to adulthood.

A range of camera positions, from wide landscape shots to ultra-intimate close-ups, instead allows us to appreciate the two hounds in their adopted setting of the Parque de los Reyes.

An easygoing, unashamedly old-fashioned picture executed with a light touch that conceals a serious and sharply topical subtext.

An infectiously enjoyable slice of knockabout nostalgia that wears its Trainspotting heritage proudly on its rough-edged tartan sleeve.

Observing how six service dogs provide crucial daily help and companionship for their grateful owners, the ruminative, accessible affair proves as soothing to the viewer as the faithful pets are to their humans.