The focus really seems to be on ensuring that the audience has a good time, whilst the cast and crew are clearly doing so themselves.
When his girlfriend is swamped with college exams, a rowdy pro-wrestler struggling to make ends meet agrees to fill in as a last-minute replacement for her well-paying babysitting job. Tom arrives at an isolated family home where he meets the precocious 10-year-old Grace. But what starts off as a quiet night of pizza and video games quickly spirals into bloody, violent, demonic chaos.
MacKenzie scores her film with traditional highland melodies, but often there is nothing to be heard beyond nature’s soundscape, wind over water and through trees.
After 40 years of solitude, a spirited elderly hermit opens up his life to young director as he tackles ill health, a declining memory, and questions as to whether or not he can live out his last years in the wilderness he calls home.
Beautifully photographed as always, with a colour palette whose soft, shifting hues reflect its moral and narrative ambiguity, A Hero is one of Farhadi’s finest works.
When an ex-con's decides to try and rehabilitate himself by returning a lost bag of coins and exploiting the media attention, nothing goes to plan.
Yes, Herself is first and foremost a film about a woman's journey. It is also, in a smaller way, about another journey, from selfishness to community spirit.
A domestic abuse survivor tries to build a new life - and home - for her kids.
Min invites us to admire them, not just pity them.
10 plaintiffs who suffered as comfort woman during World War II and their 13 lawyers stand in a courtroom in Japan. They have gone through 23 difficult trials from 1992 to 1998.
The film rests on an extraordinary physical performance by Jensen.
A talented, artistically stuck composition student starts seeing escort clients after failing to secure her scholarship. Struck with unexpected sounds during her sexual encounters, she turns them into music and the clients into her muse.
Kowalski's story of black magic and isolation takes command of its audience through a ghastly soundscape.
Nawojka, 20, dreams of escaping her harsh life working at the family farm. Under the influence of the free-spirited Sandra, Naw experiences trance-like episodes and strange powers, just like her dead mother before her.
Moreno's travels give us a sense of the enormity of what lies beneath, unhurried but curious in his progress, even homing in to look at the microscopic monsters we might not realise also make these caverns their home.
Beneath the modern city, there lies a vast labyrinth, which the filmmaker explores.
A timely, moving, frequently beautiful multi-layered portrait.
In modern-day China, two women strive to preserve Nushu, an ancient secret language that bonded generations of Chinese women together through centuries of oppression in a clandestine support system of sisterhood and survival.
One of the flaws of Malick’s film is that the main character goes into introspective mode, thereby depriving us of any real insight in to his thoughts.
The Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II.
A thorough, well-told tale intertwined with many of the key social and artistic movements of that century – and dotted with its luminaries – Hidden Master brings Lynes back out into the light.
A documentary about the fashion photographer whose rare artistic vision became apparent when he focused his attention on male nudes.
One could imagine a global, English-language remake of Hidden People that could almost write itself, largely thanks to the universal and bulletproof story.
Handcuffed and with no memory, two strangers build a raft to rescue their broken lives.
When a man who thinks his child
has been kidnapped discovers
they've nabbed the wrong kid, he
has to decide if the life of
another's son is equally worth
saving.
Taking natural sounds from the landscape, Chris Goodes has constructed a soundscape which shifts perfectly with the mood of the film, contributing to the sense of the balance of power and who is or is not an outsider.
The sole survivor of a massacre as a child, Gutjuk is recruited 12 years later to hunt for a violent Aboriginal warrior.
It’s a shame he wasn’t bolder in his use of the canvas of Hilma’s life, opting more for a careful still life approach to her history than the abstract adventurousness she merits.
The Himalayan has a very distinct sense of place. It's not just the mountains and the buildings, it's the locals used as extras, their clothes, their music.
A treacherous martial artist desperately wants his brother to marry into a rich family, but he refuses. Blinded by greed, he kills him, and gets a lookalike to take his place, then begins scheming to take over the wife's family fortune.
With backdrops which hark back to early German expressionism, looking for all the world like a Robert Wiene or FW Murnau set, Hinterland is a visual treat.
Returning to a Vienna they hardly recognise after two years in a Russian PoW camp, a group of Austrian soldiers are hunted by a sadistic serial killer.
The film is worth watching for the good work from its two leads.
A young refugee couple makes a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, but then they struggle to adjust to their new life in a small English town that has an evil lurking beneath the surface.
