San Sebastian Film Festival — A–Z of films

This initially seems like a set-up for a film exploring mental reconciliation after estrangement but the Larrieus have other ideas - perhaps too many of them.

A brilliant piece of character driven desert noir.

The abiding sense is one of a gentle progress, an unfolding as of leaves, shadows dappled sliding slowly afternoonwards.

Although initially threatening to take pretentiousness too far, Amama gathers power through the runtime.

His - and Johnson's - real triumph in Anomalisa comes in the smaller gestures and human moments

It's light tone and sprightly 80-minute length belie the depth of Veiroj's film, which is almost bursting at the seams with ideas about self-definition.

The production and costume design by Huang Wen-ying combine historical accuracy with a revelation of detailed splendour.

Hao certainly has an eye for a strong image, using the starkness of black and white photography to emphasise light and shade, hot and cold.

With imagery that shifts seamlessly from the kawaii to the diabolical, not least in a darkly psychedelic sequence near the end, this is a film that really makes its mark.

It's true what they say about violence. Too much and you become immune.

For all its supernatural stylings, it's the natural connections that count.

No less enigmatic, broad-reaching and majestically paced than a jellyfish.

The film is briskly paced, infused with energy and the backdrop remains interesting.

Larraín's judgement when it comes is fiercely Old Testament - harsh, unexpected and fast.

We are in Calvino territory, seeking out the invisible all around us.

Structurally illustrates how the indigenous people don't see time as being a chronological straight line but as multiple realities existing simultaneously.

The director, perhaps too accustomed to the more limited budget of his early films 77 Doronship and Salamander, imagines the story of Peron's corpse as a series of vignettes, which gives the film a feeling of a unsatisfactorily adapted stage play.

This is a film of two halves, the first - and best - has the cold creeping dread of icy sea water slowly soaking into your swimming costume.

Omerzu's observational, unsentimental style and the cool, stripped back lensing from Lukas Milota means that increasingly outlandish unfortunate events unfold with an acidic humour rather than melodrama.

The beats of Hester's conflict with the freeholders are hit but they lack emotional depth.

In the literal act of performance there is room to talk about self as performance, and that is where High-Rise is strongest.

Hitchcock/Truffaut has the intriguing aura of a first episode with all the questions answered easily producing 500 more to be asked.

The story is not as well-developed as it should have been but it’s an enjoyable enough treat for Allen fans for whom he can do no wrong.

Director Graham is fantastic at allowing the underlying relational strain to simmer for most of the film, in quiet, unspoken Scots Calvinist passive-aggression.

A sensitively handled female coming-of-age tale.

The melodrama in Agustí Villaronga's The King Of Havana starts in the upper stratosphere and keeps on climbing.

This 1933 classic is still the big daddy of all monster movies.

From silence and small details, César Augusto Acevedo weaves a devastating tale.

Her mix of animation, collage, and actual footage from the various periods covered suits her subject to perfection.

Both Chin and Ozturk have professional filmmaking experience but even so, what they manage to capture is remarkable given the conditions.

As cool as a multi-coloured popsicle.

Inauri does what he can with Mamuka's inner conflict but with the exception of the brothers, the characters are as flat and grey as the film's colour palette.

A bold study of what it means to be Chinese in the modern age.

Desplechin, like no other, startles with his enigmatic perceptions on the gender divide.

Nobody sneaks up on you, light-footed, perplexing, hilarious, quite the way Nanni Moretti does with his scenes.

No Man's Zone is a crushingly dull documentary, at least twice as long as the selected material warrants.

It is in the women's emotions that the heart of the matter lies and Kore-eda, as always, handles them with an elegant lightness of touch.

Fonzi's performance is perfectly judged.

The boy, played by the director's seven-year-old son Roc, looks almost as bored with the tale as we are - too many takes, perhaps?

A fine, observant comedy from a young director who takes chances that pay off and who, like his two main characters, has plenty of potential.

A melancholy look at love and the various ways in which people understand their connections to others.

Looking at all these themes on paper, there is no way they should be able to co-exist within the same film, let alone do so in harmony, but Guzmán lets each wave of thought flow over the other, tributaries of history gathering to a ocean of argument.

Amenabar would need to regress his audience back to the early Eighties for this to have any sort of suspense.

This is a side of Japan not usually shown to western audiences in mainstream theatres.

Its occasional flashes of quirkiness are never enough to justify its overstretched duration.

Villeneuve sustains the knife-edge tension without a blip.

The plot has a false bottom. You think it's over, but it's only just begun.

What marks Rúnarsson's film out from so many similar coming-of-age films, however, is its strong sense of place and the inner strength of his central character.

This is a claustrophobic, breathing-down-your-neck look at man's inhumanity to man - as though the Dardennes brothers had taken a one-way ticket to hell.

The sadness and the courage and the ambition is here

While the craft remains faultless, the effect becomes like walking through a beautiful gallery, with each painting looking lovely but with little connection to the one before or after.

It’s a wonderfully subversive act...but on its own merits (which I’m sure is how Panahi would want it to be judged) it seemed to me overlong, repetitive and self-indulgent.

Gay challenges the usual cliches of disease films.

A fiercely intellectual film, Lafosse shears away any shred of sentimentality, although humanism remains.

This is no ordinary underdog boxer story. Mariko's film instead shares DNA with Taxi Driver or Raging Bull.