Edinburgh International Film Festival — A–Z of films

Scenes don't run fully to their end or don't quite start at the beginning, the drama often whisked somewhere else as we're about to reach what more mainstream films would consider the small moments of climax.

Any film that has both a fight director and a dance choreographer is probably doing something right.

Despite its grey, flat light and general melancholy punctured by menace, An Elephant Sitting Still is, by the end considerably more optimistic than it first appears about humanity.

The greatest strength of The Apparation is how ably and confidently it projects not just uncertainty, but the nebulous possibility of it.

It's part of a long cinematic tradition. It's also adorable.

The desire to know where the documentary facet ends and the creative element from Ferrero and Biasin begins soon ebbs away in the face of bigger philosophical ideas.

If this was a lecture it would be an intellectual maze into which students lose themselves and never find a way out

The film has immense charm and skates skillfully across the surface of sentiment.

It's not that it's bad - it's certainly entertaining in places - but genre-aware meta-commentary can all too easily feel like the kind of parody where the 'joke' is in the relief of recognition.

Although the storyline here doesn't offer much that's new, the character work and visual design enable this modest little film to punch above its weight.

It's not that it's bad - if anything it's just upsetting - but it's also disappointing. There could have been more.

Essentially a love story, Casablanca is darker than a camel's eyeball.

So much is going on that Nakache and Toledano are able to slyly set-up jokes in such a way that we barely notice them, so that when they pay off their impact is greater.

It's rare for such a talky movie to be so exciting, but the wired performances combine with the visceral effects and confident direction to create an utterly absorbing experience.

It's well executed (a phrase I use unthinkingly) and did make me laugh, but not enough to allay my concerns.

The clash of cultures is right here, the black music and the white rejection

There are no surprises, no laughs out loud

The style allows for a sense of movement, which Hobbs often exploits for its witty details.

Drink in the imposition of expressionism through ergonomics, gaze up, craning at shots considered anew.

In an age where punk aesthetics are sufficiently mainstream that corporate monoliths like McDonalds seek to leverage them to sell chicken wraps, its modesty, modernity, magic work to its advantage.

While it's got some sections that are striking, it's a swing and a miss.

Hobbs exploits the machine's motion - from left to right of a page - as a way of bolstering the sense of movement.

A ridiculous idea spun into a film that skilfully mixes genuine laughs with genuine frights and chills.

Flashes a light to illuminate different stages in the life of the man who invented himself with style and grace.

The style is confused

Ashby's daughter Leigh MacManus is one of the few contributors to offer an off-set perspective of the man - and it comes with a poignancy and beat of heartfelt truth that is lacking elsewhere.

Despite, or perhaps because of this general air of ephemerality, you want to hold on to the moment and particularly to that sweet spot of youth, so deftly portrayed by Clemons, when everything is blossoming with possibility.

This film displays a deftness of touch.

Although it is technically beautifully realised and features an impressively varied and supportive score from Terry and Gyan Riley, not all of Girard’s connections fully work.

Essential viewing for anyone with a serious interest in the history of the genre.

Ideal Home isn't perfect, but 'lovely' doesn't do it justice.

When Pixar are good, they are very very good, and this is.

Brady doesn't want us to feel good, she wants us to feel the connection

The best film of 2004 - and the best superhero movie ever!

This is Ray Harryhausen's work at its finest; it was the film he was most proud of and the skeletons, stop-motion stars of a prolonged battle sequence, were his favouite creatures.

Jaws is a well-made, nuanced, gamble of a film that paid off handsomely and assured Spielberg's future.

Hill, who is only a couple of years older than her 15-year-old character, has a fierce screen presence, adeptly balancing Sarah's ballsiness and vulnerability.

Heart strings are taut for plucking

Director Tiffany Bartok doesn't shy away from the depressing aspects of Kevyn's story, nor obfuscate his responsibility for parts of what went wrong.

The presence of completists and super-fans is helpful, because you do not need to be either to enjoy Life After Flash.

I'm not sure it constitutes scholarship in and of itself, but it is certainly (as with all good documentary) a satisfying look at something hereto unseen.

Teles runs the gamut of emotions. We don't need to hear her discuss how she is feeling, we can see it written on her face

This is a film that will keep finding ways to make you feel sad.

A taut chiller, skillfully shifting audience sympathies.

A crucial historical document, but also a great film.

Elle Fanning as Shelley has sadness and fire, a performance that could be classed as electric.

The approach comes as a joyful reminder that science, philosophy and poetry need not be mutually exclusive.

There's some excellent effects work to recreate stage-blood and mummery, some real moments of tension and fright, but with four credited writers I wonder if it's trying in too many directions.

Szumowska isn't aiming for subtly here and runs the risks of some of the townsfolk's attitudes slipping into broad brush character but the pathos at the film's heart for Jacek off-sets the problem.

The plotting, though not without cliche, retains a satisfyingly robust quality - dense enough to keep you intrigued without becoming overwrought.

Finch has great fun imagining his way into the kind of passionate, dogmatic and slightly unhinged character who has only latterly begun to succeed in the industry in real life.

A Nightmare On Elm Street remains an atmospheric and genuinely unsettling film with a chilling, universally relatable central motif: sleep gets everyone in the end.

Louis Dodd's music, Thomas Blazukas' sound, Mauricio Reyes Serrano's work as DoP - all give a sense of the dreaming seas, the night, choirs and candlelit coves, corneal close-up.

A stunning feature début for Marcus Rutherford.

Though it's a difficult line to draw it never felt twee, just winsome, mostly wholesome.

Paddington is irresistible, funny and smartly constructed with a disarmingly big heart.

This is exactly what a sequel should be, respectful, goose bumpy and warm hearted

The violence is backed up with solitary confinement and mental deprivation

Flair and verve are what it's all about, a fierce confidence used to defy white power structures since the original days of putting on the Ritz.

The acting is precise in its natural flow

Without a doubt, Pesce is one of the most exciting young directors to emerge in recent years.

As well as the corrupting influence of television, Poltergeist provides a sly commentary on the tribulations of suburban life, colonialism, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the break-down of the nuclear family unit, and the damaging excesses of capi

The poem and whole tone of the film evokes Ted Hughes’ The Crow anthology.

The main source of tension here is between the two girls and their one-upmanship is well handled but even older child audiences are likely to find the general lack of any sort of danger a bit of a turn off.

Although lacking polish and sometimes frustrating in its refusal to volunteer more historical context, either of the country as a whole or the Dayak, this remains an intriguing snapshot.

As with a jigsaw puzzle, the overall picture may look familiar, but there's a real sense that craftsmanship has gone in to making sure each of the pieces fit satisfyingly together.

It’s a love story of sorts, but one which demands a lot more of its protagonists – and its audience – than most of its ilk.

Less a cross-examination than a powerful summing up of her career, Cohen and West succeed in revealing the personality of the woman beneath the gown but there's no doubt they want to heavily influence our verdict.

It's an ending that has haunted me for 30 years...

Every time I have seen Salt & Sauce I was left with an overwhelming hunger for chips.

It is magical, a trove.

Cristina Constantini and Darren Foster have produced a film that charms, compels, shines a light on a field of competition that will be unfamiliar to audiences outwith the US.

The film - co-written by Sev Ohanian - is not just clever in the way that it uses familiar programs and the Windows and Apple Mac environments but also in the way it triggers familiar emotions.

Sergio G Sánchez has lofty ambitions, involving guilt, coming of age and a whisper of the supernatural - but without the emergency brake he is usually offered by whichever director he is working with to rein him in.

Playing a game for your life is a beautiful metaphor. Of course, it wouldn't have been the same in a squash court.

It is comforting to keep in mind that the devil cannot cross your threshold without an invitation.

The pacing, like Holloway, is out of control, sometimes racing along but, more often, hanging about for no apparent reason.

This is a film that flourishes because of the strength and depth of the relationships it depicts and the strength and depth of those depictions.

While in plotting terms, the film pretty much stays in the lane you'd expect, it has plenty of heart.

It's that old magic again.

We all know the riddle solution, so Peake is inviting us to guess what will happen in the interim, which we don't.

Hauru's film is deliberately messy, satirising everything from the sacred treatment of hockey stars to yoghurt sponsorship.

This really is the funniest, campest mainstream superhero film I can remember since the Adam West incarnation of Batman.

Taut, tense, perhaps less constructed than engineered.

There's a savage kind of beauty in Pretsell's portrait of desperation and despair.

Cruise, the cheesy soundtrack and the stunning aerial photography that marks out its combat scenes are its three main selling points.

Ramsey is likely to emerge as one of the standout talents of her generation.

There will be someone, many, out there who will love it.

Taking the hand-drawn style from the original books, the animation is spare and has an engaging childlike quality.

Morag McKinnon's script is loosely off its head, part hilarity, part nonsensical innovation.

The addition of the animation allows Christiansen to leaven some of the more academic aspects of Hare's writing, putting thoughts into the mouths of different characters.

This is powerful and painful, striking.

The story, such as it is, has the dreamy flow of childhood remembered, but though the honeyed tones of the magic hour are often used, there's never a glossing over the toughness of life being faced by these free-range kids.

Iram Haq's second feature has its own dynamic and a powerful authenticity that avoids ex-colonial prejudice.

Just as you begin to worry that the conceit might not last the running time, things move in a different and unexpected direction.

More than Aretha, more than anyone, she became the figure of change for the black community

Not without its silly and over-the-top moments, Who Framed Roger Rabbit remains a very entertaining technical marvel.

There's a certain degree of decompression in its storytelling, and a willingness to jump in time and space, and though the two are strong there's a weird sense that these are the highlights and story beats of a much longer television drama.

Sometimes a film is more, much more, than the sum of its parts.

Kalifa smartly draws Zagros so that he is not merely painted as a monster.

Arthur de Pins, adapting his graphic novel, alongside co-director Alexis Ducord gets caught between the adult ideas of protest and class war, and the more kid-friendly adventures.