The Whistlers has a tonne of pulpy circuit-breakers – look out for a hilarious ‘Psycho’ tribute – to remind you not to take it all too seriously. Hitchcock would have approved.

For all its eye-opening material, The Dog still feels unfinished, but for students of New York scuzziness, it’s an essential addition.

Osika is perfect as Rita, half-child, half-woman, but then Hausner's cool, compassionate, naturalistic script, reminiscent of early Fassbinder, gives her plenty to play with.

Bravo’s movie is so pacy, so compelling that it doesn’t quite have space to land the full horror of Zola and Stefani’s situation. But what it does do is demonstrate that telling your story is a kind of performance, just like stripping is.

You’ll leave knowing slightly more about the who, what and why of WikiLeaks; you’ll also wish the whole shebang didn’t fell like such a tone-deaf data dump overall.

The story has a good dose of hokum, but the execution has an oppressive and sometimes feral quality that doesn’t just make the hairs on your neck stand up, it puts your whole body in fight-or-flight mode. An extremely impressive first film.

Midnight Special is a movie worth believing in. It's an alternative to the assembly line that turns hot young directors into purveyors of the latest shade of superhero spandex. Little here feels like science or fiction but sci-fi is exactly what this is, from the heart and out of this world.

Even with its cramp-preventing intermission, Occupied City’s epic runtime doesn’t deliver the same accretion of emotional power that makes, say, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust doc, Shoah, so great. Instead, it begins to open itself up to monotony and worse, glibness.

Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.

Working with uneven material, the illustrious cast is too often stranded in a realm of tony, high-art camp.

Escalation is the main thing Margin Call has going for it, as more substantial actors are trotted out to have their way with Chandor's realistic-sounding boardroom dialogue.

Things in The Hand of God are often funny and sad – all at the same time.

It’s a movie that loves boldly “important” ’70s-style dust jackets, loves its own lecturing voice (courtesy of neurotic narrator Eric Bogosian) and somehow makes that mélange strangely appealing.

The story itself, a twisty, hard-to-keep-track-of tale of revenge and double and triples crosses, is not especially remarkable. But that barely matters when there’s such virtuoso image-making on display.

With Jodorowsky's meaning somewhat opaque, it's slightly tedious going, but you certainly get plenty to look at.

World on a Wire is the discovery of the season, rarely screened in America but very much a key chapter in Fassbinder's story--a step toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, yet clarifying of his core artistic legacy.

Dreamweavers, visionaries, plus actors… filmmaking pair Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest DIY sci-fi bubbles with mad ideas and eerie pre-apocalyptic vibes.

It all adds up to a fascinating, amusing and enjoyably illusion-shattering study of the creative process, suggesting that modern art owes as much to opportunity and happenstance as it does to talent.

Even if it doesn’t fully probe the socio-political realities of the prison experience, Wasteman succeeds as an emotional survival tale. Here’s a film that proves that sometimes, the most terrifying part of prison can just be who you’re locked up with.

Confining its view to the narrow corridors of China’s train system—soon to be the largest of its kind in the world—The Iron Ministry vividly speaks to the country’s impossible vastness by focusing on its tiniest and most transient details, cobbling them together into a captivating mosaic of life in motion.

Tyrone Power is surprisingly good as the man accused of murdering his mistress, but the swift twists and turns of Ms Christie's plot soon drain Dietrich and Laughton's roles of any dramatic credibility.

This replaces the British version's tight, economic plotting and quirky social observations with altogether glossier production values and a typically '50s examination of the family under melodramatic stress.

Showing how the dream of being a rich and beautiful princess curdled into a nightmare might sound like a hard sell, but Spencer pulls it off in heightened, claustrophobic and truly decadent fashion.

One of the many powerful things about The Image Book is how it so aggressively rejects any sort of gloss or neat packaging. The telling is the story.

This surreal, sentimental journey does provide an excellent encapsulation of everything Ruiz did best: oddball takes on highbrow lit and lowbrow genre conventions, guided tours of characters’ mazelike memory banks, and a reveling in film culture that doubles as a cinephile’s wet dream.

Zestily performed and choreographed, beautifully shot by Robert Burks, full of standards like '76 Trombones' and 'Till There Was You', and endowed with a warming nostalgia for old-fashioned ways.

This is a deliciously languid, slinkily unsettling affair.

It’s a weird and unusually honest film.