Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival — A–Z of films

In the end, the silliness easily and organically transforms into warmth and a heart-felt experience.

As the surveys continue, different ideas of happiness emerge along with moments of shared humanity.

It’s fitting for a film set in the “City of Dreams” and that is concerned with life’s illusions and how we navigate them as it is about the here and now.

What isn't untrue is that Anora is brilliant.

Less concerned with scrutinising the playground than the dangerous games adults can play with one another.

The documentary shows how a filmmaker’s genuine connection to the people and the subject-matter of her work reveals the true heart of the story.

Illustrates how heartfelt and fastidious commitment to a story doesn't always make for engaging cinema, no matter how good the intent

A past shines through another layer of the past into a silver screen present that is both familiar and brand-new.

Coimbra's touch is assured, Ulisses Malta Jr's cinematography helps create something that looks as crisp as shadows on clean concrete.

Although most viewers will find themselves flagging before the end, there is a lot to enjoy here.

All this wholesomeness might sound cloying and unnatural, but director Yamada Naoko handles it with supreme confidence.

Director Edward Berger and his director of photography Stephane Fontaine have made every frame art.

It’s Schafer’s performance that anchors it.

By withholding information from us, Bareisa puts us in a similar headspace to the main characters.

Dying is full of glorious contradictions, many of which occur within the same conversation

Even Kafkaesque ideas are subject to chaos.

Aboyan lets Layla drive the film with an emotional intensity alongside which everything else fades.

The writer/director also zeroes in on the importance of physical contact for Ruth - something concrete in a world that is now full of things that she can’t always grasp.

Much of the cinematic language that is used in crime, action and spy films today has its origin in these silent films.

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.

This non-sensationalist approach allows much more room to address the psychological effects of prison life itself, whilst emphasising the mundanity of much of what happened under the Nazis.

Panigrahi is pitch perfect in her debut role.

Exploitation, abuse and neglect are only a part of the story. There is also a fearless pursuit of joy.

An intense pop-cultural awareness permeates Heretic. This is the doctrinal dialogue of our age.

The action is pacy but that doesn’t mean Courvoisier skims the surface.

Despite its tendency to lose sight of a unifying thread, Holy Electricity picks up a musical cadence, guiding the viewer through a series of moments that shine with a disarming honesty.

This kind of layered story construction is a difficult thing to pull off and it makes the film shine.

This is a tactile retelling, inviting us to imagine the sticky feel of Coca-Cola on hot skin in the sun or the heat of a sheepskin coat and the love that goes with it being passed from mum to daughter ahead of a trip abroad.

The silence between the calls serves as a space for the horror of them to fully take shape in the viewers’ mind.

Loznitsa’s approach is quietly observational, capturing the quotidian goings on as they continue beneath the shadow of war.

A capable actress can do only so much to make herself watchable in a movie that is often not.

It's got the musicality that proper swearing should.

Flitting from scene to scene with an increasing disregard for the constraints of logic, the film beguiles hesitant viewers with its gorgeous sets and costumes.

As the directors patiently capture the lives of Workinesh, Motto and Beti, a shared theme of familial hardship emerges.

It is gorgeous, both to look at and to listen to. It's perhaps Larrain's most accessible film, though that's as much to do with its star as its subject.

The film is an intelligent, technically proficient and complex critique of this period, weaving metaphors for the German body politic and psyche of the time.

The choice of hand-drawn animation and its ability to demonstrate a magical realism allows the film to find the right distance from what is being depicted.

Production designers Manolito Glas and Maarten Piersma do a stunning job with the sets, creating an atmosphere of sleaze and decay which one can almost smell, whilst layering in detail.

While many other films feel as though they are really staking out a deliberate political stance against the Iranian regime or coming at it from deep within metaphor, My Favourite Cake is casually, but almost constantly, rebellious in small ways.

Marie-Claire Marcotte’s feature début demonstrates an astute awareness of what it’s like to be eight.

A heartfelt film.

Simply put, the viewer is constantly tempted to attribute the character’s old man’s ramblings both to the author of the source novel and to the filmmaker adapting it.

It’s a film which uses experimental techniques to explore its themes, delivering something more like poetry than linear storytelling.

It’s the hopefulness at the heart of their tragedy that really kills you.

The close proximity camerawork employed by Sheldon Chau, coupled with the fact that the frame is often reduced by foreground intrusions, lend Pooja, Sir an intense and often claustrophobic feel.

A tactile and colour-infused film.

The only thing worse than death for these two is the thought of being left entirely alone.

Rossellini's masterpiece.

The film’s strength lies in its quieter observations of change.

Eisenberg takes us through the entire journey in a brisk 90 minutes, but the film never feels rushed.

Selective memory was something Riefenstahl excelled at and, as a director, she was also adept at staying on message in the face of counter evidence, something which Veiel scrutinises throughout.

Almodóvar goes all out with the delights fashion has to offer, bright colours, the joy of transformation - because it is never too late for sartorial metamorphosis.

Ashcroft’s interpretation steers the story away from simple tragedy as we see Mortensen making gains as well as losses.

This may present itself as a B-movie but it’s very well crafted, at every level from the dramatic to the cinematographic.

September 5 might not be a masterpiece but it is a tense, nail-biting thriller.

After award-winning shorts the deadpan documentarian has made his feature début, and it's a delight.

Avraam doesn’t spoon-feed us details, letting the various issues Smaragda is facing emerge organically.

There isn’t an ornament that feels out of place and you can almost smell the kitchen chip fat and butterfly bun icing as you gaze around Bobby’s home, with its orange pine and associated shades of brown.

It is as sweet and tender, not to mention as well-observed, a portrayal of young love as you are likely to find the other side of a John Hughes movie.

A Teacher is not the most finely crafted film, but it is a cri de cœur.

The imagery is almost dream-like, feverish and intense without straying away from reality.

Given that U Are The Universe is practically a one-man-play, Volodymyr Kravchuk masterfully commands the screen combining his knack for humour with a strong sense for drama.

A slowly driven road movie that blends comedy and drama, while it milks its laughs, some of them very loud, from the perfect timing of the revelations and from the perfectly nuanced relationships between the characters

There is a uniqueness to the way the story unfolds, blending Christian and pagan symbolis.m

Beyond the dark loneliness of grief, is the soft light of a shared mourning.

Figueroa’s genre-infused approach that suits the topic very well.

The film works as well as it does because of the central pairing of Goussens and De Saeger, whose shared glances and stray touches work on an emotional level.