Edinburgh International Film Festival — A–Z of films

People drift through the scenes occasionally but are more like ghostly hints of civilisation, ephemeral against the landscape.

Richard Fleischer's 1971 film attempts to reconstruct events and, in the process, delivers one of the most genuinely chilling entries in the serial killer canon.

This photographic formula may sound as restrictive as it is perscriptive but Thamrongrattanarit has a light approach to his ideas of memory and recollection, weaving moments of comedy and poignancy into his sweet if slight drama.

This Paraguayan thriller, featuring almost as many twists and turns as the market in which it is set, is a fast-moving, audience-pleaser with decent helpings of tension and black humour.

This is complete hand-waving trash - he's an ignorant, privileged cocky arsehole and good things happen to him. Pass the sick bucket.

As a snapshot of life at 30 in contemporary Athens, All Cats Are Brilliant (Sygharitiria Stous Esiodoxous?) is sensitive and sincere.

As a kind of call to arms against nostalgia on the one hand but forgetfulness on the other, Uruguayan-born Michael Wahrmann charts ambitious terrain.

The Bling Ring cuts through the vapid foam to the vapid core to ask questions about morality, responsibility and where desolate idleness may lead.

This is a fluid film which, though impressionistic in terms of its narrative, carries a weight of emotion and the positive energy of childhood as well as a longing for fundamental connection.

This is a film made entirely from hints and suggestions, red herrings and glimpses of a world in which nothing is orderly.

Zaman is not looking to rush to judgement of his characters but to explore what makes them tick and give a feel for how traditions get passed down the generations.

The depiction of this generation whose boats have not been lifted by China's economic tide seems a fair one.

A fascinating meta-textual picture.

While the tension ratchets up, there are rockets, redemption, reams of secrets.

Serebrennikov's film may be sometimes confusing, sometimes confounding and somewhat disappointing in the neatness of its ending, but there's no denying his talent.

Shino is interested in memory and experimentation, ditching traditional narrative in favour of a Super-8 stroll through the echoes of the past.

A frequently comic script is enhanced by the naturalism with which all the actors deliver their lines.

Director Drake Doremus handles the material superbly, aware of its pitfalls and sensitive to all the vagaries of human behaviour which make these characters so intriguing.

Genuinely funny, heart-warming.

Feature debutant Mikael Marcimain matches the script’s fine balance between dramatic clarity and the more ambiguous intrigues of a conspiracy thriller with some pinpoint direction.

A gently-paced comedy of errors and manners.

If it sometimes feels like Wan's falling back on the tricks of the trade, he's also often able to spin something unexpected out of the familiar.

All of it is so beautifully observed it is as waking from a childhood fever to demolish half a volume of Grimm before hallucinatory somnambulance washes once more over.

A film about film history may sound dry, but the stories captured here crackle with life and enthusiasm.

Despite Alvarez's good work with his actors, the oil of Sedaris's satirical characters and water of Alvarez's indie sensibilities refuse to mix.

Will best reward those who are prepared to pay attention and stick with its twirls and pirouettes until the complex pay-off.

Tempered by a script that leads in directions that feel a bit silly at times.

If you didn't know this film was made in North Korea, you could be forgiven for thinking it is a South Korean parody of a propaganda movie.

The actors sell it.

It's a film that's full of visual life, amid the arid, hard surroundings.

The emphasis here is on the immediate and indirect ecological effects, which the film renders in aesthetic terms without ever becoming a compelling interrogation in itself.

Everardo Valerio Gout directs as though he may never get another chance, throwing just about everything he can at his first feature - and quite a lot of what he throws is impressive, even if he sometimes tries just a little too hard.

A superior sense of place and editorial timing lends the Breki's disaster urgency, tension and terror.

Jennifer Steinman has achieved something special.

This is an excellent film.

The setting may be current and sound edgy on paper but beneath the zeitgeist veneer, the mainstream thriller formula they employ is as familiar as your slippers.

Feels like an attempt to stretch out what should really exist as a short film.

The film feels longer than its two-hour duration precisely because its tone seems so unsustainably whimsical.

The film works as a marriage between the sometimes absurd scripting and the skilfully understated acting.

Weigel’s imagery has an appreciably rugged edge – colourfully vivid on the one hand but ethereally retro on the other.

Contains vast plot holes that even small children will be quick to spot.

After it premiered at Sundance it was branded in fundamentalist quarters as "anti-Iranian" - what is certainly not in doubt is that it is "anti-viewer".

A charming bit of stop-motion and well worth seeking out.

Falls just shy of a state of perfection.

There is talk of his reaching a "transcendent place of nothingness", but this is not tranquil, this fading - it is distressing, discomfiting.

You can enter through the objects, like an Eames chair or three pairs of Ray Bans, bought online. Or through the religious conflict inherent in a bacon bagel.

Raaphorst and scriptwriter Chris W Mitchell seem so proud of the look that they completely forget that a film also needs to have a decent plot and characters lying beneath the costumes.

It's an intimate, focused look on an unhappy family - but can only tell half of its story.

An amazing film, masterfully paced.

This is amazing stuff.

The nature of Harry Dean Stanton means that no documentary is ever going to get underneath his skin, yet director Sophie Huber does manage to crack his defensive wall on occasion.

As with all personal documentaries, it is almost inevitable that what you gain in intimacy, you lose in objectivity.

A layered portrait of what's happening around a kid, oblivious, even endangered.

Though each filmmaker provides typical servings of his own respective style in responding to the brief at hand, this portmanteau piece is predictably uneven.

Ostensibly simple but brave enough to give its audience the time to understand, ID knows what it's looking for, and you should seek it out.

A full picture of the nuts and bolts of people smuggling.

Neil's insistence on telling his own story with his own voice, on getting that voice out there for the rest of the world to listen to, is itself a fierce act, evidence of a rare vitality.

Extraordinarily exciting and often disturbing PG-rated stuff.

The film shows how easily an individual can be domestically, emotionally, politically and legally marginalised.

Kang Yi-kwan's film bristles with life despite his understated style.

This is an impressionistic portrait, as multi-faceted and delicate as the flies which we see being created at points through the film.

This is a film that is at times painfully beautiful, with some striking sequences that are painterly in their execution.

João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodriguez’s film is a seamless and absorbing blend of essay film and hardboiled thriller.

An awe-inspiring experience.

The film never goes anywhere, never develops any conflict and never feels believable.

A strangely successful hybrid between erotic ghost story and social commentary, it’s one of this year’s more compelling features.

Those who like films to start at A, proceed through B and end at C will find Torres' multi-layered, cluttered narrative difficult to contend with but those that prefer to disappear into a film without a road map will find plenty to enjoy.

There is no dull speaker, and director Simon Ennis deftly illustrates the subjects with well-chosen archive footage.

The effect is like opening a Russian doll, with each successive layer further skewing what we might consider to be real and what imagined.

Worth seeing for the performances but ultimately confusion reigns.

If ever a film deserved the adjective elegiac, Mister John is it.

It's not that the new crowd aren't fun, but they're a distraction from those of us who would prefer to spend more time with the best buddy double-act in the Pixar universe.

Cheang brings a gritty aesthetic to bear, more interested than smoke and sparks than sleek set pieces.

It's just not very funny.

The film doesn’t seem to have much to say about racism, and even less about its potential links to family, class and gender – all of which hang in the background, threatening to force the filmmakers to make a more serious and challenging film.

An intriguing look at a small story that reflects a much bigger picture.

Each of the performances adds to the whole but it's Won-sang Park who carries the film on his increasingly damaged shoulders.

Leonardo Brzezicki's feature debut Noche demonstrates that he is able to manage individual moments a lot more ably than culmulative effects.

If there is one positive thing that can be said about the film it is that it lives up to the promise of its title.

Mostly, Of Snails And Men is a light, entertaining comedy.

The film takes great joy in two old men poring over family connections and the past.

Outpost 3's menagerie of menace is a muddle.

For all its bombast – the thwacks, the thuds, the slowed-down bang of a gunshot – one never really believes these guys are in trouble.

There’s something poetically haunting about the couple’s existence and the smallness of their world.

Sniadecki and Cohn draw us into this space at the same time as frustrating all notions of narrative, momentum or rhythm.

Apfel's film just watches, even surveils.

Pluto is an oddly funny film - inhabiting as isolated a world as its titular celestial body.

Barreto's film is a stylish feast for the eyes, registering the nuances of the 50s turning into the 60s.

Context can be everything and it's likely that the more you bring to Måns Månsson's odd docu-fiction hybrid the more you are likely to get out of it.

This is a film that is worth looking closely at, as everything shows signs of great care and consideration, and Sanctuary is certainly worthy of it.

For all its visual skill and mostly good performances, this is a tiresome, dull film.

The medium is a time capsule, a documented moment, perpetually frozen in time.

Good documentary finds something interesting, great documentary shows us its subject in an interesting way, and this is a great documentary - brilliant, even.

A touching, beautifully constructed story.

Director Jonathan Gurfinkel's film rides a deeply uncomfortable societal line between misogynistic conservatism and liberation through feminism.

The film’s strict and self-imposed limitations mean that the wider forces by which the trio’s gruelling routine is largely governed only seep through here and there.

With such a powerful story and a charismatic lead like Heston, it's hard to go wrong.

What is not in doubt is the raw emotion in this work - from Polley quivering with nervous energy as she watches her father read some of the more revelatory pieces of script - to the visible impact airing the family's dirty linen in public has on her sibli

We're transported into a world of cinema; some of it is known, much of it unknown, which surely fires the imagination of any viewing cinephile.

Some of the dialogue could be more polished, but the brutal honesty... makes up for it.

The film began as a series of web shorts and that episodic hit and miss nature endures.

If you persevere - and at the screening I attended many did not - the film finds its voice at about the same moment as we hear someone speak for the first time.

Wang is matter-of-fact in his presentation of these quiet dramas.

This Is Martin Bonner is undoubtedly a small film but it is finely crafted and has a big heart.

El-Qalqili Sr. is a fiery figure who seems unable to sit with his daughter without finding some point of contention in the wording of her questions.

As the kids, Zamand Taha and Sarwar Fazil are good, but their charm and cheeky grins aren't enough to save Up & Away.

The subject of understanding and mystery prove a sticking point, with the film remaining so wilfully opaque that it is more frustrating than rewarding by the end credits.

The film's aware that it's an improbable story, so it does everything in its power to couch it as being based on a true story, but for all that it's ironically unconvincing.

Being disorientated is part of the game of art - from William Shakespeare to the present.

The documentary-style diary is interspersed with striking single shots of nature.

With candy colours and high energy blasting it along, director Adam Wong and writer Chan Tai Lee bring a sugar rush of enthusiasm to the teen dance genre.

Manning's real life sacrifices and internal torment are the beating heart of the film.

Nai puts in an understated performance as Wang, but Ying coats many of the scenes in heavy symbolism.

Grandrieux’s view appears to be a cold and harsh one.

Directed with wit and panache by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, written by Carroll Cartwright and Nancy Doyne, Maisie stays true to Henry James's two-part essence.

Forgetting Ain El-Heweh seems to be something the rest of the world has got good act, Fleifel's heart-felt film is a powerful reminder.

Mournful in tone and associative in style and rhythm.