San Sebastian Film Festival — A–Z of films

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.

The seven stories knit together well, and provide an engrossing and alternative view of a city whose image has long been absorbed into popular culture

After Lucia is an uncomfortable and disturbing experience with a vengeful sting in the tail.

Haneke goes far beyond pushing emotional buttons into territory where our most visceral fears lurk.

Richard Gere is getting better with age. The lived-in look suits him and he holds this film tight.

For a movie that treats penetration with military precision, it is not as radical as it appears. Traditional rites-of-passage sentiments surrounding the Prom remain intact.

This is what used to be known in the sixth form lavs as bike shed humour - infantile male gags about the female anatomy, genitalia, show-off swaggering and sexual innuendos, so broad they flatten subtlety and boil boob gags until they pop.

One of The Angels' Share's strongest points is the way the script and the actors capture natural language.

Affleck knows how to keep a tight grip on a story, gets better at ratcheting tension with every film, and displays a fearlessness when it comes to mixing genre.

More sedate than scintillating, it is nevertheless impressively shot by newcomer Daniel Vilar - a name to look out for - and beautifully acted.

There's some fun to be had among the commotion of the outbreak, but it all seems too stretched to really bite deep as either satire or schlock.

Watching, you will believe that you can touch, smell, almost taste her wonderful creations.

There's poetry, tough love and, above all, a fierce stoicism on the bayou in Benh Zeitlin's strikingly beautiful and haunting debut.

Although much of the action is played for dark comedy, Berger undercuts his pastiche with unexpected poignancy at key moments.

Comes close to redefining cool.

The unconscious is never suppressed and the id runs riot

Don’t be tempted to dismiss it as another fluffy chick flick – this is a film with balls, bite and plenty to appeal to both sexes.

Complex and immersive, funny but with a sense of danger lurking in its darker moments, this is the sort of film that children and adults will watch to the end and then want to watch again.

This is an ensemble triumph, somehow made all the more amiable by its general lack of earth-shattering incident.

Rebollo, reinvents the Road Movie, just as Leos Carax does in Holy Motors.

Dude, what's the point of this movie?

There is an energy to this low-budget film

Scores heavily as a mood-driven character exploration of the nature of familial love, duty, conflict and its impact on the innocent.

Finding out that your girlfriend is leaving you for another man is humiliating enough, but finding out that he's Russell Brand is another story.

The film lacks strong enough dialogue to do justice to the boldness of its script.

This film makes a number of intriguing choices.

The sort of film that practically defines the festival experience, but that one could not ever imagine watching in any other context.

Everything is wreathed in snow and the crisp air seems to make the stark absence of clues even crueller,.

A film well worth seeking out, or rediscovering, if you like stupid films that are actually made by very clever – and very funny – people.

A film and a story where you can't afford to be out of the conversation.

Ozon loves to let his audience's perceptions clash.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona spins the focus in on a single family caught up in the disaster, personalising the horror and bringing it home in unashamedly melodramatic fashion on its very own tidal wave of emotion.

An on-paper melodrama imbued with musical energy and comical mischief by an excellent ensemble cast.

Catalina Saavedra gives a wonderful performance as the frustrated Raquel.

Everything here is meticulously planned yet the effect is of something effortless.

The movie is eccentric and wild in one respect and positive and cool in another.

The script has been tatooed on a fingernail. It is so small, you need binoculars.

'Pedestrian' is too racy a word to describe it.

Pablo Larraín's No is a resounding yes!

A quietly humorous, gently endearing examination of one man's attempts to get his hands on the American dream.

What you expect from a bunch of stoners, but done well enough so you won't care.

A refreshingly low-key and visually distinct work.

In some ways it brings to mind the psychopathological novels of new wave science fiction.

There are similarities to the work of David Lynch and Jocelyn Moorhouse, but this is something entirely fresh.

What gives this film an edge over conventional rites-of-passage movies is its oddity.

Leads and support cast alike march their talents off a cliff like the most earnest of lemmings.

It soon becomes clear that it isn’t the destination, and the discovery of Emak Bakia, that is the most interesting thing about the film, but the journey itself.

Isolation rules and comfort is cold in Scott Graham's gripping and emotionally tense feature debut.

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

Most real, and at once divine, are the scenes in nature.

It takes messy and unresolved dynamics and finds their poetry. Can’t say sexier than that.

The pace of the film, like the turning of the seasons, country life and the shift in control of the Bras empire, is slow, but no less enthralling for that.

I honestly wish I'd written this movie, and I suspect a handful of people my age feel the same way.

The ensemble playing is on a level of communication that hardly requires a script, flowing like sick down the front of a summer dress.

An immersive dive into an offbeat and murky corner of modern Argentine life.

Drew Barrymore's directorial debut blasts in some girls who just want to have fun - and you'll be happy to join them.

The humour exaggerates the worst excesses of Saturday Night Live.