Glasgow Film Festival — A–Z of films

Campillo has a weakness in not knowing when to trim all the talking.

The land is a major player in this otherwise small scale drama and the only thing that really keeps pace with Ryan’s performance.

There's strong stuff here, but for the very reasons the film describes, it's often difficult to connect with.

You don’t need to be English – or even British – to appreciate this brilliantly constructed film.

Its warmth and good humour make it easy to like and there’s a playfulness about it that keeps it engaging.

Whilst the titans themselves are cartoonish grotesques, scenes soaked in blood and gore still manage to disturb.

This is a tale told with unusual sensitivity and skill.

The feeling of exposure to evil never fades

This simple yet charming film is perfect for young children.

Nobody plays lazy like Jeff Bridges. You could say he was born to it. Or rather, he's such a good actor he makes it look as natural as an unmade bed.

Full of visceral action from start to finish, this is a kinetic mix of impressive stunts and inventive shots.

An astonishing debut.

Her life story plays out like an adventure novel overflowing with intrigue.

Intelligent, humane and multi-layered, The Breadwinner is a much more substantial film than its central heroic narrative might suggest.

A visually innovative film... Godard has done a masterful job, and his witty script never struggles to hold audience attention.

Despite the dangers of the journey, The Camino Voyage is, for the most part, a gentle, lyrical film.

Remarkably adept in balancing audience sympathies and bold in its refusal to choose the most easily justified routes for its characters, The Charmer is a powerful piece of cinema.

A beautiful piece of slow cinema that really brings the audience close to its subject.

Carpignano is interested in the margins - and the fringes of those margins.

Silverstone immerses herself in the character of Cher.

The most ambitious, assured and accomplished work to date from Xavier Gens, Cold Skin is terrifying in places and heartbreaking in others.

The sense of poise created, as people move through spaces or talk back and forth, objects often leaving the frame in one direction as another enters from the opposite side, achieves a soothing rhythm.

This ambitious feature debut is packed with interesting ideas.

Though a short film, even one of half-an-hour as Legrand’s was, can be carried almost solely on this sort of tension, a feature needs something more.

As the story glides gracefully from pitch-black comedy to complicated tragedy, you are in no doubt this is a film which happened at the right time in the careers of its two central stars, and for cinema.

Dawn Of The Dead is an astounding work that holds up to this day.

Both the principal actors are on great form.

A cool, classic and creative action picture.

A cleverly constructed piece of low-budget filmmaking, Directions punches well above its weight.

As a comedy it delivers laughs, as a piece of northerly 'ostalgia' it manages quite ably to convey culture clashes and the various disappointments of leaving one's homeland.

Leuenberger makes Nora's gradual awakening to gender issues feel like the sun coming out on a dreary day, brimful of unexpected warmth.

A compelling and powerful character piece.

Its exploration of the tension between the real and the fake is timely and important.

Lelio makes no bones about how he wants us to feel, to the point where it sometimes feels as though he is stating the obvious is six-foot neon letters.

Whether she is probing at the ideas of the ties that bind us to a home or considering the morality of goat horns, she constantly nudges us to move around and, perhaps, get a better view.

Few voices are missing from this incredibly thorough piece of work.

Ben Brand’s low key camerawork, much of it handheld, fits the culture to which the young protagonists belong and lends events a sense of immediacy.

Samuel Maoz steps into the rhythm of the foxtrot to give structure to the three separate chapters of his intense, reverberating film.

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

This is a film weighted with questions, balancing this burden with a luminous beauty.

The real pleasure of the film is in the non-stop parade of funny, well-observed scenes and killer lines of dialogue.

Despite its age, The Grapes Of Wrath remains watchable throughout and is a highly effective piece of cinema.

This testimony from a part of the Second World War that is often forgotten in the West is a valuable contribution to the records.

The overall effect is more like watching a drama class experimenting with a theme than watching a film.

The energy is electric

Hant and Borodachyov's neatest trick is the way that the two men's awfulness to one another - a sort of no-holds-barred bitter-off - paradoxically stokes our sympathies.

Packed with powerful archive footage, this is a film that immediately creates a powerful sense of time and place.

Go in as a fan of Anderson's work and you will not be disappointed. Go in as a fan of film and you will likely be delighted.

Akin asks us to shift our perceptions of terrorist attacks in deliberately provocative ways, constantly flipping what we think we know and what we expect to see right up until the film's haunting final image.

Keep The Change tells an intricate love story, featuring people we rarely get to see on the big screen

Skelly, whose only previous experience is in television, acquits herself well in the central role, imbuing it with a potent physicality.

Notable for the extraordinary beauty of its settings.

Denis and Binoche take a perceptive and light approach to what could have been hackneyed material.

The family may be only one major money event away from poverty but this is a portrayal of dearth by a thousand cuts that many working class people face - and not just in America.

The focus here, despite the title, is less on the truth and more on how different people respond to uncertainty.

Richard Kendrick's cinematography is gorgeous and O'Malley is unafraid to let his camera linger, drawing out the atmosphere in scenes lesser directors might have rushed.

Nice

Deadpan absurdity, everyday madness and enlightenment through routine merge in an attempt to answer the big questions of life.

The script is cleverly done, the key relationships well and economically drawn; and while this is clearly comedy, it does not pull its punches.

Part romance, part observational comedy, Man Proposes, God Disposes also has a keen sense of the loneliness that being lost in a strange country can bring.

An impressive score and imaginative visuals.

A sterling performance from a silvery Liam Neeson.

It's as if I Spit On Your Grave has been transformed into a Kabuki drama.

The setting of a Ghibli film in England immediately throws up strange contrasts and contradictons, and these are in many ways the most interesting aspect of the film.

The relationship between the sisters is well defined and sensitively explored.

Flynn is convincing and sympathetic in the lead.

Miracle is the Donald Trump joke that arrived at the party too late.

One can almost smell the oil and dirt and sweat, feel the trembling of the earth as machines begin to hum.

The plot stumbles into an abyss early. There is nothing left because there was nothing here in the first place

Van Eck holds his own well in the central role whilst Taylan delivers a complex performance.

This is a sudden and astonishing arrival for an adult actor.

The journey to this point for Sierra speaks of the passion project that it is - and the film benefits hugely from his engagement with the emotional aspects of the story.

This is astonishing filmmaking.

No Date, No Signature is a moral maze in which superb performances mean we can never lose sight of the human impact of what might seem like logical decisions.

Though a little too crude to work as powerfully as it might in dramatic terms, Old Beast is nevertheless an important film.

This is Catholic working class life beyond the limits of restraint where the concept of social order collapses and acts of individual kindness come as a surprise.

With a keen eye for absurdity and the hypocrisies of suburban life, Haywood finds comedy in the bleakest situations.

Yannis Drakopoulos is on fine form in the central role and there are some great supporting performances.

Pyewacket takes a simple story – a modern interpretation of an age old morality tale – and spins it out slowly to ratchet up the tension.

An excellent demonstration (in places) of Daan Bakker's agility and ability as a writer and director.

Unlike many examples of cinema from an earlier generation, Rebel Without A Cause is dynamic edge-of-the-seat viewing many years on.

One of the most artful and creative zombie films for some years.

Fargeat uses a lot of old tricks to give her desert a haunting, mystical quality, but she uses them well in a film that oozes style.

The craft, the knowledge, the deep communication with the animal, shown without words - this is breathtaking, transcendent cinema.

This is one of the most enjoyable works of its kind.

Works both on a technical level and as sheer entertainment.

A natural crowd movie.

It avoids every cliche laid down in the history of search-and-rescue movies

This is so well observed that I feel fair expressing concerns about the choices of font in certain official publications.

It’s that forceful central performance that really makes The Swan special.

There is artistry here and an absence of cliche.

As wilfully messy as all of Cohen’s work but his wicked sense of humour, budget-enforced ingenuity and ability to draw off-kilter performances from unlikely thesps shines through.

The lightness of touch so evident in his family films is no less deft here, as he woos us with the promise of cast iron fact.... only to spend the rest of the film oiling the ground beneath our beliefs until they can't stop sliding this way and that

The weirdness thrives on understatement

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

This is an enjoyable creature-feature, a special-effects showcase on a small budget.

All the actors here are non-professionals and Das elicits extraordinarily natural performances from them.

The strength of this film is in Chaverri’’s finely judged performance.

The sobriety of her narrative and her attention to detail, mirrored in Thomas’ choice of illustration, gives her a good deal of credibility.

This creative and visually arresting adaptation of Brian Selznick’s critically acclaimed novel marks a filmmaker at the top of his game.

Its deft handling of feminist issues make it all the more ironic that it has been dismissed as trivial when in many ways it's the female equivalent of Wall Street.

It quite subtly toys with the iconography of the genre - poking at the outlying parts of it, the parts dealing with "foreigness" and "home" rather than the more dependable elements of right and wrong.

On closer viewing, complex textures emerge.

Low key and unfussy, Wild Roses gradually builds up tension through small observations and the skilled performances of its two female leads.

Lucas and Howard's often-dark adventure is still an enjoyable sword-and-sorcery tale.

Nothing plays out as you expect, with Ramsay maintaining an unsettling staccato that keeps both the action and the viewer on edge.

The sun shines, friends are endlessly patient (if not always very understanding), and even during its bleak moments, there’s always the promise of a happy ending.

This is a very particular film - one where particles of detail crystallise into observation, meaning and import accreting like nacre around grit, producing a pearl, a natural jewel.