Fantastic Fest — A–Z of films

Pregnancy is often depicted as a state of enhanced vulnerability, and one which points the way to increased dependency. Here, Alaoui turns that around.

The aerial shots of the forest and the believable transformations with feathers, wings, beaks and claws as well as fish scales, make for riveting viewing.

This is not an erotic movie, true there are copious scenes of copulation... but Brass doesn't linger on them long enough for them to become titillating, he has to show something gross and/or bloody in the same scene.

Its pastiches of mid-20th Century Korean cinema are beautifully observed and a lot of fun.

It’s cleverly written, beautifully performed and quite unforgettable, and yet I hesitate to recommend that anybody watch it.

Um is interested in how such landscapes seduce us into particular ways of thinking.

Detail abounds. Glorious detail.

It’s in [its] understanding of working life that the film really excels, and it’s refreshing to see working class characters given centre stage in a story like this.

For all its faults, the film is pretty, and that will probably be enough for some viewers.

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.

A fascinating portrait of a cinematic era which will leave those who remain martial arts fans with a lot of titles to hunt down.

What’s missing in most folk horror tales –and indeed in many otherwise diligent historical films – is an understanding of the different perspectives of people with pre-enlightenment beliefs. It’s here that writer Karpala truly triumphs.

An impressively self-sufficient horror film with a dash of socio-political commentary.

Sometimes the rumblings are of the Shaw Brothers, at others the Marx Brothers.

Every year sees the production of dozens of thrillers trying to do what this one does. Jackdaw leaves them in the dust.

Unashamedly quirky but burtsting with the love of film, this is the sort of one-off doc that’s as much about the engaging playfulness of its construction as it is the content.

The Last Stop In Yuma County tells a simple story but does so in an extraordinary way. It’s a film you won’t forget for a long, long time.

There are so many great stories surrounding Cliff that it’s clear director Jake West was spoilt for choice.

In the end, the film succeeds not so much because of its thriller elements as because it’s an interesting character piece.

After a lot of scene setting, the film delivers, almost out of nowhere, an intense and fully committed mythology which takes night scenes already set against a pitch black sky to a still darker place.

We stumble through the night with only guttering flames to guide us, straining to catch the tiniest sound that might give us a hint of what’s out there.

It’s an anarchic mess – the sort of film the Joker himself might have made, and that’s part of its triumph.

It’s nice to see a film which problematises familiar, overly comfortable assumptions about the sociological response to new technologies, and which doesn’t insist that babies need to be thrown out with bathwater.

Told from a child’s point of view, immediate and haphazard, magical and unlikely.

Yamaguchi and his regular writer, Makoto Ueda, have such a deep understanding of their characters that it’s the emotional timeline, rather than the physical one, that becomes the subject of real concern.

Wexler makes a number of interesting directorial choices.

Stopmotion is not a film that strives to keep secrets or deliver surprises. It wants us to understand what’s happening, at least to an extent, and still be helpless to prevent it.

A gorgeous piece of work.

It feels like a natural successor to Gordon’s work, and a film of which he would have been proud.

The script is funny and knowing but it wavers between a straight out kids' movie and horror aimed at an older teenage audience.

The cheesy subtext is obscured by gross-out verbal and visual display, which wears down resistance to the basic message of wholesome optimism that many teenagers would not be keen to admit.

Even in the cheapest of zombie films, human bodies have never come apart so easily, nor contained such an abundance of blood. It explodes across the screen at frequent intervals, each one more spectacular than the last.

By far the best instalment to date, with a stylistic consistency and a sharp wit which make it worth seeking out regardless of your feelings about the found footage genre as a whole.

The line between horror and humour is at least as thin as that veil between the worlds, and crossing it can bring all sorts of things back. This is one of them.

Clavijo’s tightly wound performance keeps the story feeling taut and personal as its larger themes develop.

Elegantly styled and smoothly delivered, the film takes a hard look at corporate culture.

The film carries us from a carefree existence made possible by not paying attention, to a crushing tragedy.

A beautifully crafted piece of period Gothic.

The film keeps us guessing for quite some time, despite delivering a number of unsettling hints