In Pearce’s sure hands, the film sustains its tension, even as it sideswipes the audience with slickly executed change of tone.

Indivisible peers and probes, offering a sensitive, insightful and sometimes even dream-like rumination on the cost of seeking and subverting normality.

It’s a little rough around the edges but there’s no denying the film’s unflinching potency.

There’s enough cinema in Among the Believers to set it a step above solid respectable investigation.

Layering its fairly straightforward story of an adopted Irish girl who tracks down her birth mother with immersive visual and aural motifs, it plays more like modern operatic tragedy than run-of-the-mill social drama.

Theron will put to rest any doubts about her feel for comedy; the darker the better.... As Tully, Mackenzie Davis is radiant.

Childhood is a mystery we endlessly come back to and a place the Leydens have never fully left; Ní Chianáin gives the viewer an intimate view of it in this unusual little story.

Slow is a supremely confident piece of filmmaking that negotiates the tricky terrain of non-typical sexualities with sensitivity, humour and a refreshing lightness of touch.

BenDavid Grabinski’s time-twisty, sci-fi gangster comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is brimming with hair-brained schemes and hilarious gags; the kind of unruly one night adventure that isn’t about logic, it’s about stoking delirium.

Love is a constant saving grace in The Mysterious Gaze Of The Flamingo. Diego Cespedes’s striking debut feature blends together a heady mixture of melodrama, western and coming of age tale to create an imaginative, indignant AIDS-era story.

The saga, directed by a Scot in New Zealand with no American actors, takes us back to American truths. Guns, greed and rugged nature defined the West, setting the New World apart from the old. The roots run deep.

Ethel & Ernest is, at its heart, a fond character study.

The Innocents successfully weds three elements: a strong, original concept distilled through a smart screenplay; excellent young performances; and a mise-en-scene which puts the audience in a child’s circular view of a very small world - tiny by nature of childhood itself, in which the smallest areas are unfathomably large, and also by circumstance on a self-contained housing estate.

Moshe is not the first filmmaker to grapple with theories surrounding the manipulation of the fabric of time but his intimate approach, coupled with strong performances, make this an intelligent homespun take on a familiar subject.

Big, bombastic and full-blooded, Jeymes Samuel’s neo-Western might tick off plenty of the tropes of the genre, but the outlaw energy he brings to the picture makes it feel, if not fresh exactly, then certainly a whole lot of fun.

The Dissident holds few new revelations but presents its case with enough infuriating evidence and storytelling power to make it worthwhile.

Understated and confidently judged, it becomes a testimony to the old-fashioned virtues of social-realist storytelling rooted in ordinary lives and timely concerns.

In a scant 72 minutes and in a few locations, Holmer has found a dignity in her appealing subjects, and a mystery.

Egilsdottir makes Inga a very sympathetic figure, playing her with the bone weary resolve of someone who recognises that she has nothing left to lose.

A thoroughly enjoyable, visually ravishing feminist Western played out in the widescreen vistas of rural Indonesia, Marlina The Murderer In Four Acts weaves basic elements into a tale worth telling splendidly accompanied by a sit-up-and-take-notice musical score.

While the entire cast impresses, standout performances come from Murphy and Lycurgo. They make it clear that Steve and Shy are two sides of the same coin, both shaped by past trauma and finding it almost impossible to exorcise their demons.

My Sunshine is a deceptively sweet little heartwarmer that eventually cuts deeper.

This is an atmospherically shot film about African oral culture, about riots, street musicians and storytellers. But it also uses the space and denizens of the prison as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions within Ivorian society.

Leyla Bouzid’s fiercely committed debut should draw plenty of attention not only for the way it deals with the political climate in her homeland but also for how she charts the painful transition of her lead character from outspoken, rebellious adolescence to a more careful and often resigned adulthood.

Josef Kubota Wladyka’s third feature film is a playful and whimsical confection, a deft blend of escapist kitsch and the real emotional heft that Kikuchi brings to the role.

Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels.

The Oscar-winning actress gives a volcanic performance that is nonetheless very controlled, avoiding melodramatic theatrics. Pattinson plays off his costar superbly, giving us an inattentive husband who comes to realise how little he understands about his wife.

Reticence is also the keynote of The History of Sound’s two riveting central performances.