I have to give credit for The Flash understanding it is derivative, repetitive, even repeating elements of its opening for comic effect.
Barry Allen uses his super speed to change the past, but his attempt to save his family creates a world without super heroes, forcing him to race for his life in order to save the future.
Flashback seems designed to allow multiple simultaneous interpretations.
After encountering a man from his past, a young man attempts to piece together his fragmented recollections about taking an experimental drug called Mercury, which could be connected to a girl's disappearance.
The Flats gives voice to people who have lived most of their lives feeling silenced, but it’s all the little details it captures in passing that speak loudest.
Joe and his Belfast neighbors reenact childhood memories from the violent Troubles era in their Catholic district, exploring the collective experiences that shaped their lives and community.
By animating the whole movie, Rasmussen makes the story feel more immersive and of a whole piece.
Amin arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Denmark from Afghanistan. Today, he is a successful academic and is getting married to his long-time boyfriend. A secret he has been hiding for 20 years threatens to ruin the life he has built.
The unassuming love story serves a second purpose, employing a personal lens to explore the European Union’s troubling status quo.
Étienne is a lorry driver. Fastened to the road, his love life is reduced to fleeting, nameless encounters in parking lots. When he meets Bartosz, a Polish lorry driver, his loneliness is turned upside down.
Ochipinti's film benefits from a strong documentary underpinning - with the lead actress saying that 70 per cent of what occurs is based on her own story at the film's Berlin screening - showing how strong cultural expectations like this can be.
Verida is due to marry in three months. According to a Mauritanian tradition, she has to put on a lot of weight to appeal to her husband. The weight gain process gets harder as it progresses, and Verida begins to ask herself if this is what she really wants.
Jokes are low-brow but delight audiences easily enough to give the film international appeal.
A group of gangsters on the run hide out in an old country house and fall in love with it, dreaming of a different life; but their past is out to get them.
Judicious editing of considerably more footage - and interviews indicate she shot around 400 hours - would have given her the opportunity to develop the film into something more cohesive regarding the state of the nation.
Documentary snapshot of the Aidar battalion during the conflict with Russia in the east of the country.
It feels like a mid-season episode of one of the interminable slew of acronym-based law enforcement shows.
A pilot transports an air marshal accompanying a fugitive to trial. As they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar and trust is tested, as not everyone on board is who they seem.
It doesn’t follow the familiar rules of the revenge movie and doesn’t provide the same type of satisfaction. McIntyre is more interested in finding real solutions.
An indigenous Australian family is torn apart by powerful white landowners, prompting fierce resistance.
Ideas of war in the abstract and the tension between the necessity of an action and the action itself will go on to be explored throughout a film that mostly concerns itself with the horrors of war that happen away from the frontline.
A war-weary general oversees his troops close to home.
Strømdahl keeps us within the apartment for virtually the whole film, watching as Mikal tries to negotiate the unpredictability of Tonya and Jason or retreats into a world of video games.
Documentary following a boy living in a motel with parents who struggle with alcohol abuse.
Clear-sighted perspective, coupled with carefully calibrated sound design from Dario Swade, doesn’t make light of what Jamal experiences, but nor does it sensationalise them.
A young man in supported housing tries to juggle his musical aspirations and mental health issues.
Cat’s viewpoint predominates, and Zilbalodis has an acute understanding of how the world looks from its point of view, of what catches its attention and how its body follows instinctively.
An animated adventure about a group of animals who must work together to survive a catastrophe in a post-human world.
A film in two parts: a first act filmed as an observational documentary in the world's largest flower market, followed by a fictional second act about a man, afflicted by a terminal illness, encountering a stranger in a train station bar.
Set almost entirely within a single toilet stall, this is low budget filmmaking par excellence.
Finding his ex in the nightclub where she works and convincing her to come back and live with him should be doable, correct? Losing the dealer and the bar owner who left him for dead in the restroom for trying to steal their stash is still within his capabilities. However, removing his head stuck in the toilet bowl is not a given.
Borg's assured direction and the cinematography of Christopher Ross (of darker Eden Lake and London to Brighton fame) maintain a noir-like chiaroscuro style throughout.
John is a professional gambler but when he meets a beautiful and mysterious new bookie his life starts to spiral out of control.
Feels more like an amuse bouche than a full meal, while at the same time all proving a bit too much.
A flatulence-plagued narrator guides us through the closed space of a manor house where an arts patron and director of the Sonic Catering Institute uses various forms of manipulation in order to get a trio of performance artists to provide ever better results.
Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on NASA launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, the countdown truly begins.
Simple things like a radio suddenly switching on, a wine glass falling to the floor, or an insistent knocking at the door are an object lesson to contemporary horror’s blood-soaked tyros.
A small town on the California coast is swathed in a mysterious fog containing the vengeful ghosts of shipwrecked sailors.
Mythic scenes aside, Ewing and Grady approach their storytelling in a quiet, unobtrusive way which almost gives viewers the impression that they are the ones choosing to follow this particular path through it all.
Teenagers attend a folk high school in Arctic Norway, relying on themselves, peers, and sled dogs as they navigate the path to adulthood and uncharted personal growth.
Made on a very small budget but getting away with it remarkably well, the film succeeds in challenging some popular assumptions about women who seek to become internet celebrities.
An aspiring actress responds to a mysterious classified ad and finds herself trapped in her new boss's twisted revenge fantasy.
A sweet tale which explores the precariousness of late childhood, as young people take on more responsibility for the world around them and come to carry more secret pain.
A city boy recently relocated to the countryside becomes fascinated by an isolated girl who is obsessed with a crop circle in her grandfather's fields.
This set-up may be a little clumsy, but lively ensemble performances and magnificent production design give the film has a lived-in feeling, a depth and richness which make its excesses much easier to accept
A sixtysomething housewife reevaluates her life as she rediscovers her passion for cooking and falls for a chef.
The initially breezy tone of the comedy gives way to a depiction of calculated cruelty monstrously vicious enough almost to qualify as horror, human enough to count as tragedy and nuanced enough to face viewers with a most unusual kind of dilemma, part in
Tale of father-son rivalries within the Israeli academic establishment.
Aleñar Iglesias... presents the ordinary world as loaded with meaning.
During her Mallorca summer, Antonia recognises similarities with her late grandma. She develops an influence over her mourning grandpa through dress-up, blurring who inhabits who.
An astute portrait of an experience still underexplored onscreen.
An Iranian-born teenager is desperate to fit in at her new high school in Canada, but the more she tries to absorb and understand the unfamiliar mindset, the more she becomes consumed by a dark entity.
Dietrich is, as usual, magnificently knowing, mannered and sensual.
Black romantic comedy with political overtones still relevant today. Out to own now as part of the 18-disc Marlene Dietrich: The Movie Collection DVD box set.
There is a simple message from the film – only action can free us from the dark thoughts of hopelessness, inactivity, the impossibility of making a real change.
War photographer Rita Leistner turns her expert lens onto a community of tree planters who overcome grueling conditions and emotional difficulties to bring back the forest one tree at a time.
