Belfast Film Festival — A–Z of films

A film of true originality...triumph of courage over conformity

Protagonist Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in a neatly furnished home, no longer feels the need to hide his sexuality, and tells himself he’s fine, but the music says otherwise.

Hüller has always been an unfussy actress, who allows a character's flaws to shine out in interesting ways.

The film has the maverick nature of originality, constantly surprising, never explaining.

The unadorned observation of the physical aspects of the relationship in which middle-aged bodies are shown without artifice is one of the most hypnotic aspect of Naveriani’s vision.

Purev-Ochir gives a sense of the pressures the younger generation are under through their experience in the classroom, with a tacit implication that Ze’s struggles are reflecting a spirit of a nation.

Moreno isn’t shy about his use of symbolism...What this effects to disguise, however, is the degree to which [the men's] own thinking has been shaped by symbols and by the belief system which surrounds them.

An effective little thriller.

Jude masterfully keeps the audience attached to the screen for almost three hours without relying on heightened tensions or conventional plot twists.

There are so many shots through things, boundaries, borders, thresholds, that we are primed for other barriers crossed. Those transgressions are not light ones, but in them is an abject honesty.

An amuse-bouche of a film, Aki Kaurismäki’s latest comedy romance may leave you wanting more but it’s also a fully rounded, good looking experience packed with all the flavours we’ve come to expect from the master of deadpan down the years.

There’s something inherently endearing about the way that Nikou always managed to conjure timelessness in his worlds. They’re more analogue than futuristic but ultimately hang in a sort of limbo of ‘here but not quite now’.

Kordofani uses the greater intimacy offered by the camera to bring us close to the characters and reveal the complex layers of relationship developing between them.

It’s cobbled together so haphazardly that one finds oneself wanting to hand out a badge for effort, because it’s not easy to make a feature film from nothing, yet whilst the team behind it ought to feel proud of themselves, it’s not very watchable.

A fresh spin on territory that has been frequently explored.

There’s a freshness to this world, as if one had just stepped out of one’s own door and arrived in an unexpected place.

By the end you might not only ask yourself if someone is losing their marbles but whose marbles, in fact, are the ones that are being lost.

This 1933 classic is still the big daddy of all monster movies.

A beautifully constructed piece of work in which every detail serves the whole, putting the tools of the epic at the disposal of a story which is intimate and delicately realised.

Lanthimos skillfully transforms this lustful carnival into a coming-of-age drama, emphasising the protagonist's mastery of sexuality as a connotation of her mental evolution.

The idea of different things being in and out of focus for the various generations runs through a film that has sweetly comic moments and poignancy in equal measure.

There are no shortcuts in this film, no conventions and nothing careless.