For all the care and attention, Hernandez has lavished on his creation there is one inescapable problem: the film is not that interesting, nor involving.
A 17-year-old Mexican boy agonises over his lover, who has walked out on him.
The plot may be clear and the tonal shifts from comedy to erotica and horror impressively handled but the character motivations are frustratingly fuzzy.
Romance - and trouble - brew on a farm in Kentucky.
Every movement is beautifully choreographed leading up to and into the inevitable gun battle, so that characters seem predestined to end up where they do.
A gang leader and a police detective engage in a dangerous battle of wits in a busy hospital neurology ward.
Worth a look if you appreciate four top actors giving better performances than the material really deserves.
A Tube driver accidentally runs over two people, then hears of the ‘three and out’ rule, which offers a huge financial incentive to find someone suitably suicidal...
This is not, like so many films with Iraq as plot element, about the military’s inhumanity to others, but its careless disregard for the wellbeing of its own.
Three sailors face up to their future and their past on an eventful night out in Sydney.
Wang is matter-of-fact in his presentation of these quiet dramas.
Three peasant sisters - aged ten, six and four - try to get by in the mountains after their mother abandons them and their father has to go away to work.
Stands out in the Bergman canon for the beautiful cinematography by Bergman's long time DoP, Sven Nykvist. The haunting contrasts suit the wild isolation of Faro down to a tee.
A recently released mental hospital patient goes back to her home on a secluded island with her family, resulting in emotional and spiritual crisis.
Walter Lima Jr's exquisitely photographed film is big on atmosphere, short on structural detail - very much in the spirit of Henry James' work, and you will get more out of it if you are already familiar with that.
A young governess becomes convinced that the children in her charge face a supernatural threat.
The setting may be small-town, but this is a vision in microcosm of a whole nation that has been driven inevitably towards anxiety and unease by self-imposed pressures and impossible aspirations.
Teenager from the 'burbs attempts to quit suckin'.
Though it has a simple story, somewhat blank acting and awkwardly choreographed fights, its every flaw corresponds perfectly with the make-up of the original series.
Live action kids adventure, based on the long running UK puppet TV show.
Expertly made, passionately enthusiastic, one of the best films of the year.
A tribute to the Kashmere Stage Band, looking at their remarkable history and the influence of Conrad "Prof" Johnson, who turned a school band into a worldwide sensation.
The humour itself is as light as a feather – a symbol used by Andeel in his animation to good effect – but the reaction from the regime(s) is about as subtle as a brick
Charting Bassem Youssef’s rise as Egypt’s foremost on-screen satirist.
Far from being a roaring, sinewy beast with a lot of bite that the title might suggest, John Boorman's latest has more in common with a lumbering white elephant.
A successful Irish businessman has his life thrown into disarray by a doppelganger.
The film looks terrific and is beautifully paced by the Cornuau brothers.
The first motorised special police unit in Paris before the Great War contains terrorism, uncovers corruption and falls under the spell of a Russian princess.
Alexander Alexandrov's grimy cinematography shows us the dirt and the grit we have come to associate with working class Americans going off the rails, and applies it to well cared for suburban homes and cityscapes usually pictured as glamorous.
A documentary filmmaker whose wife is pregnant starts to lose his grip.
Beautifully shot, in a near documentary style, by Bahman Ghobaadi, it really draws the viewer into the plight of the many Kurdish families without a homeland.
A young Kurdish boy must support his family in Northern Iran.
It elegantly shows a clear path between the jazz riffs that were Nas's father's bread and butter through to the inventive beats that back his son's hip hop.
Guy Pearce is a puzzling lead, at times desperately out of his depth, mostly getting away with it due to his skill at looking lost and miserable as he mumbles his lines and does a bizarre impression of Nick Cave.
An inventor travels through time to try to change the past.
Rather than engage with the rightness or wrongness of the Israeli position... the film gives life, colour and moral variation to a people often portrayed as monolithic in their agreement.
Love, loss and betrayal in a religious Jewish community.
