Patrick Gamble

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.

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

A deeply felt personal journey, the film shifts seamlessly from unflinching realism to a poetic expression of masculinity in crisis; crossing back-and-forth across the blurred boundary that separates art and reportage to create a totally unforgettable film about the bond between people and place.

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

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

A lovingly crafted and well observed story about adolescent self discovery – and to this day remains one of the most remarkable films produced by Studio Ghibli.

Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent individualism.

The Green Fog is part city symphony, part playful tribute; but primarily an example of pure, unadulterated cinematic delirium.

While the film's mischievous narrative manipulation will inevitably irk some viewers, this beautifully rendered opportunity to view the world through the eyes of those who can no longer see is a smart and moving portrayal of living with an ocular condition.

A major contributor to the reverential narrative of wistful cinema, Giuseppe Tornatore’s magnum opus Cinema Paradiso is an elegant distillation of the form’s escapist qualities and the garland of an industry that understands global audiences’ enduring appetite for wild nostalgia.

A conspicuous example of political cinema made into art, The Wild Boys has more ideas in its 110 minute runtime than most filmmakers have in their entire oeuvres; jumping gleefully into the murky waters of gender politics and taking great delight in the overflowing bounty of cinephilic pleasures and vulgar perversities that spurt onto the screen.

It's a curt, nasty and deftly acted chamber piece high on laughs and savagery about frustrated idealism and how little it takes to make society fall to pieces.

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.

An empathetic depiction of two marginalised ways of life; God's Own Country is a deeply felt romance that harnesses the primal relationship between people and place.

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.

An ornately mounted story marked with tints of antiquarianism, The Lost City of Z is perhaps Gray's most accomplished film to date.

An exquisitely rendered study of entitlement and millennial dissatisfaction.

A low-key yet complex family drama, My Happy Family is a quietly devastating portrait of what it means to be a woman in a man's world.

The topic of who can participate in the arts often ignores society’s racial prejudices and class assumptions, thankfully The Plagiarists’ perfectly judged mimicry of independent cinema illustrates the profound effect a lack of diversity has on the type of art that gets made.

This deeply felt Paraguayan drama shines a light on the nation’s fractured identity by crossing numerous generational and class divides.

Quillévéré has created a poignant exploration not just of death, but of life, love and fragility.

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

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.

With little action taking place for the majority of the film, this slow boiling story is more of an insightful character study than a heart pounding thriller.

Effective in articulating how relationships work as a way of transferring and understanding the unspoken and unseen feelings that lay dormant within us all, Netzer's intelligent portrait of a ticking time-bomb relationship sadly lacks the warmth and tenderness required for it ever to ignite.

A slow-burning drama about slavery in all its forms, this austere, visually striking film combines a harrowing period of Brazilian history with devastating accuracy of emotion.

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.