Thessaloniki International Film Festival — A–Z of films

Life by, if not on, the road, is revealed in snippets, an impromptu dance here, a joke with a customer there, building a picture of shared humanity and communication that often goes beyond language.

A dynamic, lean, but refreshingly lightweight viewing experience.

A film unlike anything else you’ll see this year.

It's difficult to know how much acting is involved in this film - and that, of course, is part of what makes it work.

The directors with their fifth feature take a humane view of the plight of their subjects but spare us any over-sentimentality

La Bola Negra was an unfinished work in a life cut short but the film named (variously) for it is extension and tribute and triumph.

Throughout, Yeon’s directorial skill and Byun Bong-sun’s stylish cinematography grip viewers’ attention.

Modest in scale but rich in mood.

Matoshi is brilliantly cast, her expressive performance showing the many facets of fear.

Sociopolitics spritzes delicately, like the water from the club's sprinklers, over the whole affair.

What Sigríður, Markus Englmair, and Ugla have done as writers and writer/director is hang a disaster movie on top of a family drama. That is what makes the film compelling.

The unassuming love story serves a second purpose, employing a personal lens to explore the European Union’s troubling status quo.

A fascinating and mature ensemble piece

Deberton keeps the camera close and attentive to micro-gestures

Home certainly screams, sometimes with urgency, sometimes with the strain of a story still too close to its maker.

Grounded in whimsy and wonder but willing to embrace a dark edge

What follows is not a simple coming-out narrative and not a whodunit either, but an internal struggle constantly externalised through ritual and space.

Iván & Hadoum announces de la Rosa as a filmmaker with uncommon emotional precision.

The docufictional construction can become meditative to the point of meandering, a tug-of-war between autobiography and fiction that sometimes weighs down the story.

De Araújo is particularly good at evoking the emotional turmoil Jo feels.

What remains true now, as it was then, is the scale and scope of the thing.

Eventually, The Lost Son ends up as a mixed bag that serves as a portfolio of Štante’s technical abilities as a director, but shortcomings as a writer.

The plot begins where screenwriting manuals would suggest a cut, in the aimless downtime of everyday life.

Mauro Herce's cinematography is stunning and merges perfectly with the soundscape created by Emilio García Rivas.

There exists no safe ground when you are part of a regime that uses fear and threats as casual tools.

Along with her eye for composition, Reichardt also deserves praise for the focus on the smaller period details.

Miiku Sakanishi’s gentle debut builds a movingly humanistic consideration of family and community relationships, while also musing on our connection to photography itself.

Zvyagintsev handles this material with his familiar control: psychological realism, cold visual restraint and an aversion to overt flourish.

Made over many months by a tiny cast and crew who themselves lived on the otherwise uninhabited island and sowed and tended the crops there, The Naked Island is both in love with labour, and a labour of love.

The issue is that if you strip out the elevated craft and A-list performances, what is left is the sort of bread-and-butter plot arc Cagney & Lacey used to rely on back in the day.

The ambition is admirable; the execution uneven.

The River Train lets language do what plot will not always do, it gives a child’s abstract longings a body.

At its most interesting when the robot-building team is in Herat, its hometown, the film addresses aspects of Afghan life not always noticed by outsiders.

Each set-piece revelation is sprung like a physical blow to the solar plexus.

Suffers from an underdeveloped subplot and over-indulged length.

The film looks amazing, but it sounds even more incredible.

Le Coroller’s horror is at its best when it focuses on Margot’s psychological meltdown as she works against the clock.

A film which makes you rethink your perceptions and encourages you to ponder deeper questions of humanity.

Tender Loving Care is all about the little bits of conversation that make the world a bit more comfy for others.

Rebel Without A Cause for grown-ups.

This is a shocking, visceral work. There are moments of humour, here and there, but it is the gallows laughing.

The cinematography is stunning, as one would expect given Roeg’s background, and conveys the vastness of the landscape even as the drama remains small and intimate.

It presents a radically different cinematic language, childlike, initially amoral, lyrical.

For those wanting a straightforward story with identifiable protagonists, Zabriskie Point may seem like a mess. But if you were wanting such simplistic entertainment, why would you go to see a film by Antonioni?