FrightFest — A–Z of films

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

Await Further Instructions succeeds on all counts.

Dean Devlin's thriller is well structured and features cleverly thought out action sequences that maximise the potential in simple shifts of power.

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.

Craine puts a lot of passion into her performance, making for a gutsy lead we can keep rooting for even when other aspects of the film are weak.

The iconography of the feminine is twisted into something deadly.

What begins with shrewd character observation and a good deal of bitter humour gradually sheds its skins and becomes something more blatantly horrific.

If you're a fan of gleefully executed giallo-style carnage, you'll struggle to find a film that features quite as many murders as this one.

There's a lot packed into Justin P Lange's downbeat horror fable.

Ellery Bute and Todd Jeffrey's art direction presents us with picture postcard settings which conceal much darker things.

It's worth suspending disbelief for a tale that grips where it matters and, through its superb performances, serves as a potent reminder that there were real human beings at the heart of all the real life horrors.

Collier has created a portrait of the festival that will delight its longstanding fans yet which is thorough and insightful enough to be of interest to outsiders too.

Though there's a soap opera character to the overarching drama, it's in subtle moments that the film excels.

When it's not busy trying to impress, the film conjures up a lot of atmosphere and succeeds in disturbing.

The story itself is simple but the presentation makes this an unusual and intriguing piece of work.

It's too brainless and uncomplicated to make us think twice about the plot.

What Laugier lacks as a writer he makes up for as a director, aided by some high quality costuming and set design.

Played out as a grand, Fifties style Italian melodrama, the film is anything but dry.

Director Evan Cecil delivers all the grisly scenes you would expect from this scenario, but they play out in ways that might surprise you.

The whole thing is beautifully shot in far higher resolution than most viewers are likely to get the benefit of.

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

Gonzalo Calzada's vividly atmospheric film is itself a space in which reality and dreams overlap, in which formal narrative structures break down as our heroine strives to gain control of her identity and destiny.

There are the makings of a great film here but too much time is spent telling the story and not enough showing it.

Van Dammen has bitten off much more than he can chew and lacks the experience to spit some of it out, but it's largely his ambition that makes things interesting.

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.

Expanding on the notion of loneliness and the importance of familiar places in our lives, Rocher brings in themes about emotional dependency, possessiveness and the ways we define our identities in relation to others.

Good chemistry between Dufour and Champion means that their bond feels real and keeps us caring for them even during the silliest parts of the story.

A film that understands its audience exceptionally well.

Much of what follows is routine horror movie stuff but it's given additional weight by writer/director Padraig Reynolds' understanding of the after-effects of trauma.

Director Anthony Scott Burns delivers some real chills but it's the positive aspect of the film, the sense that there's still room for joy in these difficult lives, that makes them so potent.

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

Horror has taken us to cabins in the woods many times before, but it has rarely done so with such spirit.

A natural crowd movie.

The performances that director Issa López gets out of the children, most of whom are new to acting, are extraordinary.

I went with the expectation that I'd see some good old-fashioned cyberpunk-inflected kicky-punch and was not disappointed.

A consciously downbeat film in which there can never be any guarantee of salvation.

There's an alertness here to the dynamics of domestic abuse that gives the film depth.

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

De Paoli uses a bagful of cinematic tricks to make viewers identify with Piet at his worst.