Wendy Ide

Fascinating and informative, it’s a ‘must-watch’ for film students and fans alike.

Remarkable access and nerves of steel (on the part of both the subjects and of filmmaker Hogir Hirori) makes for a riveting documentary which is as tense as it is revealing.

The striking feature film debut from Andreas Fontana brings a prickly thriller sensibility to the closed world of high finance and a piquancy to the phrase ‘dirty money’.

This is a film which fizzes with originality, one which works both as a pacey thriller and a playfully surreal intellectual exercise.

While Kahn offers no overt criticism, it’s hard not to question the sustainability of an art market that has evolved into a kind of prestige car park for vast quantities of money.

It’s frequently an uncomfortable watch and, at points, prompts prickly ethical questions about the potential for the re-traumatisation of documentary subjects. But, perhaps more unexpectedly, this bold and confrontational film is also joyous, playful and in some ways even empowering.

It’s a richly detailed mosaic of a movie which pays as much attention to emotional authenticity – a dull ache of grief which is the aftermath of the First World War and a smouldering yearning between the two lovers – as it does to the story itself.

Like much of her digital work in the twentieth century, Varda’s approach here is a kind of expansive introspection; it’s a film which looks both inwards and outwards at the same time. And like Varda herself, it pulls off the combination of a trundling, amiable pace with a biting intellectual acuity.

Kala Azar is something rather special. It’s foetid and atmospheric, a feral scavenger of a film which sniffs around its themes before sinking its teeth into the meat of a beasts’ eye view of the breakdown of civilisation.

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

It asks pertinent questions about loneliness and a world in which algorithms can know us better than our human partners ever will.

What’s perhaps unexpected, in a film that has the look of a brooding fable by Carl Theodore Dreyer, is how funny it is at times.

This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.

The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.

This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.

It’s a heightened caricature, certainly, but there are uncomfortable truths underpinning the surreal excesses.

The latest anime from Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) is a beguilingly sweet-natured little gem. The film balances spiralling flights of fancy with glinting observations on parenting and family dynamics.

Savage’s success at getting under the skin of the kind of cancerous depression which gnaws away at the soul means that this is not always the easiest watch. There are no audience-appeasing neat happy endings, just raw emotional wounds and aching compromises. But, despite a low key approach, this is a compelling, sometimes wrenching drama.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a furiously visceral force behind the camera. His knuckleduster direction goes beyond mere muscularity and takes on the daunting persuasive power of a mob enforcer; his storytelling is both thrilling and utterly terrifying.

The slow creep of the camera mirrors the incremental build in pressure; this is the kind of tension that feels like a tightening chokehold on the audience.

Both the film and its cast of charismatic, dreadlocked old-timers are loaded with an easy charm that is as heady as anything that gets smoked during the course of the recording sessions.

This arresting first feature blends sci-fi and fantasy to create a worldview which is at once savagely grotesque and alarmingly familiar.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

It is a film which celebrates empowerment and the exhilarating release of finding a voice and being heard.

Ron’s Gone Wrong transcends the familiarity of the story (there’s a thematic an overlap with Big Hero 6 and How To Train Your Dragon, to name just two) with deft writing, appealing animation and a big heart crammed into a small malfunctioning robot.

One of the main strengths of Chadha’s approach is the way she weaves the historical detail into the richly textured story with such a light touch.

It’s an accomplished, ambitious work which has a Herzogian fascination with vast, unforgiving landscapes, hubris and madness.

This is a picture with first-rate fight choreography to match the quality of the martial arts talent involved.