Patrick Gamble

Blending and bending genres to highlight the elusiveness of the truth, Green's avant-garde documentary presents the audience with a wealth of interviewees, each giving their own account of how the murder was reported.

Littered with keen observations about modern life and gentle moments of dark humour, this tale of how we live now masks a tender exploration of the human body as the last refuge in a world of binary oppression.

A handsomely crafted, yet overacted revenge tale with a broken moral compass, Prisoners fails to build upon its taut atmosphere of suspense with anything of particular social value.

Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart.

Uneven, convoluted and laden with far too many twists and turns Creepy sadly struggles to balance both terror and suspense, with any intrigue dissipating long before the film's secrets are eventually unravelled.

A poignant study of gender politics enshrined within an anthropologically fascinating drama.

As with all of Farhadi's films there's a frailty behind his characters, with their insecurities and moral dilemmas bubbling to the surface as the director slowly raises the temperature in this pressure cooker of domestic strife. Nervous editing and sinuous cinematography also give the impression that Farhadi is choreographing his stars rather than directing them.

A fluent, confident and deeply felt work by an astute chronicler of life, Things to Come considers the fragility of ideas when exposed to the eroding force of time in beautifully humane fashion.

Hard to Be a God is a cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen.

The Club is an enthralling parable that's calibrated to shock and amuse in equal measure.

Poetic realism for a digital age, Tangerine also shares a lot of qualities with the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. There's no cheap manipulation here and Baker's characters never come across as victims.

Ixcanul may struggle to tackle the larger issue it posits but well represents the lives and rituals of the marginalised community it seeks to give a voice.

Inhabiting the space between fact and fiction, where repressed memories often seek refuge, The Pearl Button weaves a fascinating, yet traumatic route through Chile's recent history.

The Forbidden Room (2015) is Maddin's aesthetic nearing critical mass, a whimsical, genre-spanning opus that demonstrates the totality of his enigmatic style.

By adopting an eerily voyeuristic approach and filming the barren North Dakota landscape with a cold, penetrating gaze Welcome to Leith creates a bone chilling atmosphere not too dissimilar to a horror film; leading the audience down a compelling, yet genuinely unnerving path into the darkest rudiments of the human psyche.

The Falling's refreshingly all-female perspective expects the viewer to become wholly caught up in its broad surge of feeling, yet there's something unsatisfactory and disaffecting about the film's asinine finale.

The Gift might not smash the boundaries of genre filmmaking but therein lies its appeal; a smart, well-made thriller that balances high-minded cinema with genre thrills.

A postmodern experiment in both form and function, Life of Riley's rigidity can at times feel like its restricting its actors, leaving them unable to treads the boards with the same authority they would on the stage.

Most importantly, Appropriate Behaviour is funny, and not just sporadically entertaining, the film is a riotous series of mishaps from start to finish.

A desire to avoid sentimentality is admirable, yet Still Alice relies entirely on Moore's performance to mask its multitude of shortcomings.

Despite falling into the occasional genre trap, every step of Catch Me Daddy points to a pair of filmmakers unafraid to make brave and interesting choices.

Schipper's script doesn't quite complement his technical prowess and once you peer behind the smoke and mirrors of the film's one-take gimmick the criminal-underworld lurking behind it feels trite and contrived.... Yet none of this can take away from its pure entertainment factor. An experience akin to a burst of pure adrenaline intravenously introduced to your bloodstream, Victoria remains one helluva ride.

Coherence is a debut of tremendous ambition and potential, yet sadly, despite some genuine moments of tension, the film ironically makes too many wrong turns and its convoluted themes fail to coalesce on a human level, tempering the initial intrigue and culminating in a plaintive sense of admiration, rather than enraptured adulation.

Despite Blanchett's resplendent performance and the comforting assurances that are inherent with any excursion into the reliably innocuous Disney universe it's tough to overlook the fact that there's something depressingly antiquated about Branagh's dazzling fairytale and its regressive sexual politics.

Loaded with unremarkable statements on moral resolve and brimming with arrogance, this desultory study of grief and the need for an artist to suffer in order to create great art is as hollow and throwaway as the redundant platitude it derives its name from.

The performances of both Moss and Waterston are tremendous, filling the empty spaces of the frame with a suffocating mist of pain and suffering.

Each scene is presented like a taro card for the viewer to assign his or her own meaning. Occasionally this can lead to a profound and deeply personal connection to the film whilst at others it can feel like Malick is overreaching; with large swaths of the narrative washing over you like an agreeable summer's breeze.