The production design of Redoubt is nothing short of a triumph.
At the peak of the Cold War, farm worker Karl-Göran Persson starts fortifying his house. He gathers scrap metal and casts it into the walls to build a fortress meant to protect himself and his neighbours setting him on the path to conflict with his community
It’s refreshing to encounter a multiverse film that doesn’t mess about.
Irene Kelly travels through parallel universes, repeatedly killing her daughter's murderer. As she becomes consumed by vengeance, her humanity hangs in the balance.
Rodriguez weaves an incestuous blurring of genres – now amnesiac psychodrama, now desert gothic, now grotesque slash-n-dash, now perverted tragedy - that is genuinely disorienting.
Trouble brews in redneck Utah for a pair of siblings trying to come to terms with a horrifying attack.
Shot in stark black-and-white, Luis Emilio Guzmán’s script builds its pressure through texture and restraint.
As the military coup unfolds across the country, Captain Jorge Silva – the former head of Air Force Intelligence – is torn between duty and conscience.
Patriarchal and paternalistic structures at both a family and country level are put in the spotlight.
Set in Madagascar in the early 1970s, on one of the last air bases of the French army, where military families live the last throes of colonialism. Influenced by his reading of the intrepid comic book heroine Fantômette, ten-year-old Thomas sweeps with a curious glance what surrounds him, while the world gradually opens up to a different reality.
Those parts of the plot concerned with the politics and practice of espionage are frequently overshadowed by the romance themes, the result being more Mills & Boon than John le Carré.
The story of Joan Stanley, who was exposed as the KGB's longest-serving British spy.
There’s smart staging, structural and visual misdirection, and a number of sharp twists.
When an outspoken queer screenwriter is chosen to pen the final instalment of the legendary slasher franchise The Red Mask, she and her girlfriend are harassed by die-hard fans. They escape to a secluded Airbnb, where she concocts a dangerous game to play to unlock her writer’s block. Then two uninvited guests crash the scene.
Achour does a fine job of binding us to his adolescent hero’s perspective, as the boy tries to process the death and what it means within the limited framework of ideas available to him.
After two young shepherds are attacked on a mountainside, Achraf, 14, is ordered to take the severed head of his cousin Nizar back to their family as a macabre message.
There's little actual sport here, with more extensive focus on the half time entertainment, but that won't stop ice hockey fans from enjoying this ripping yarn.
The story of what happened when Americans bought a Russian ice hockey team.
The film’s focus on women and, specifically, female antagonists enables it to address aspects of the US malaise which are frequently overlooked in cinema.
On the eve of the 2020 election, a posse of progressives ride into red country. They have no idea what's waiting for them.
A first stab at directing for actor Craig Conway, Red Riding scores high on atmosphere and is grounded by a strong central performance.
After her mother's overdose, teen Red Riding moves from London to her estranged grandmother's Scottish estate, where dark family secrets, missing children, and a monstrous wolf blur reality, forcing her to fight for survival.
As sweet-natured as it is bloody, Red Snow is anchored by an ebullient performance from Cisneros, who is in almost every scene yet never seems to flag.
A struggling vampire romance novelist must defend herself against real-life vampires during Christmas in Lake Tahoe.
Nielsen may not have been able to act - and this is by far her worst performance - but she certainly had the charisma to carry off the role, together with the all-important muscle.
A warrior with a magical sword sets out to take back a powerful talisman from the sorceress who destroyed her city.
Writer/director Sven Bresser lets events unfold slowly and makes great use of silence.
When reed cutter Johan discovers the lifeless body of a girl on his land, he is overcome by an ambiguous sense of guilt. While taking care of his granddaughter, he sets out on a quest to track down evil. But darkness can thrive in unexpected places.
This film uses strikingly clear water to show shadowy movements down below, emphasising the three dimensional landscape of the sea in a way that few shark movies achieve.
After her sister's murder, Nic, her younger sister and two friends seek solace through a Pacific island kayaking adventure. Hours into the trip the women discover that they are being stalked by a shark.
For something so lovely, it is hard-edged, and it sparkles with visual wit.
When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d’Azur is confronted by the demons and darlings of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.
Holding all of this together is the tremendous atmosphere that Baizhan generates out of shadows, cramped locations and unsettling sounds.
When a young girl is left with her aging grandmother in rural Kazakhstan, an ordinary act of familial care quickly turns into an unsettling descent into the unknown where loss can take monstrous forms.
For all its playful trappings, this is at heart a survival film.
With the impending Y2K apocalypse fast approaching, Abbie is faced with the ultimate challenge - the unbeatable level 256 on Pac-Man - and he can't get off the couch until he conquers it. A survival story set in a living room.
Director Natalie Erika James, still only in her twenties, draws viewers into her astonishing debut feature by externalising the horrors of a disease that will be all too familiar to many.
When Edna, the elderly and widowed matriarch of the family, goes missing, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam travel to their remote family home to find her. Soon after her return, they start to discover a sinister presence haunting the house and taking control of Edna.
Through heartfelt and very conventional storytelling Nair simplifies, pleads, and misses the chances to shift the very current problematics into a new light.
A successful stockbroker finds his glittering career shattered after the Twin Towers fall, and is drawn back to the conflict in his homeland of Pakistan.
Bethmann understands the situation well, but her closeness to the teenager and the personal character that the film takes on as a result is something else.
Ku Stevens, a 17-year-old Native American runner, struggles to navigate his dream of becoming a collegiate athlete as the memory of his great grandfather's escape from an Indian boarding school begins to connect past, present, and future.
The ideas are presented in a crisp, unfussy way by James Ivory. He’s working with an intelligent script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and two impeccable central performances by Hopkins and Thompson.
A butler realises late in life the folly of his devotion to the household he has served.
Though Hoult is as oddly charming as his abilities allow, Nicholas goes as close to the Full Cage as I've seen in a while.
Renfield is forced to procure Dracula's prey and do his every bidding, no matter how debasing - but now, after centuries of servitude, he's ready for a life outside the shadow of the Prince of Darkness.
It might not be a Renoir, in either of the two historic senses, but it is an elegant and enjoyable drama filled with beauty, passion and a near sublime gentleness of spirit.
The old age of the artist, exploring his relationship with a model and his son.
