Nigel Floyd

Against all the odds, Stake Land director Jim Mickle has cooked up a controlled, affecting ‘companion piece’ that honours the Mexican original while deepening its themes.

Big Bad Wolves requires a high tolerance for pain, but its wicked humour and oblique satire rip open Israel's paranoid, militarised system like a jagged saw blade.

Lovering’s taut direction and editor Jon Amos’s skilfully modulated cutting wring the maximum suspense from cinematographer David Katznelson’s multi-camera set-ups, tapping into deep-rooted psychological and primal fears.

American Mary nods savvily to the ‘body horror’ of ‘Audition’ and ‘Dead Ringers’ but still possesses a truly original, deeply disturbing vision.

Cleverly written, authentically staged and sympathetically played, it's brave, uncompromising, and above all, frighteningly believable.

It is Depardieu who supplies the heart and soul of the film with a performance of towering strength and heartbreaking pathos.

The shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.

A brilliantly staged early scare signals that the safety rails are off and, despite an unexpected, last-minute swerve into the supernatural realm, the edge-of-the-seat tension is sustained to the very last second.

Fisher taps a rich vein of Romanticism here, making this the high point of a series that afterwards degenerated into the sloppy self-parody of Jimmy Sangster's The Horror of Frankenstein.

In the final scenes, the film slides into a Hardyesque fatalism, with the loose ends tied up a little too neatly, resulting in an air of literary contrivance. It nevertheless succeeds, like the earlier film, in tapping the well-springs of one's emotions.

A serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film.

Embracing every level of French society, from the aristocratic hosts to a poacher turned servant, the film presents a hilarious yet melancholic picture of a nation riven by petty class distinctions.

An extraordinarily inventive fantasy in which schoolboy Warnock is rescued from a dull suburban existence by a band of renegade dwarfs, who emerge from his wardrobe and whisk him off on an incredible journey through time and space. Sometime Monty Python animator Gilliam fills the screen with bizarre images, and directs with a breathless ingenuity.

The taut action, sparse dialogue, and faultless technique keep things moving so fast that there's no time to reflect upon the morality of war or the miraculous way in which Flynn and his men survive against such overwhelming odds.

Edmund H North's intelligent script and Wise's smooth direction are serious without being solemn, while Bernard Herrmann's effectively alien-sounding score reinforces the atmosphere of strangeness and potential menace.