Venice Film Festival — A–Z of films

It’s not unusual to say that something cuts through the silence but in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April it’s the silence that cuts through us.

Halina Reijn's film is a rewarding piece of work, in no small part because of how it challenges its subjects and its audience.

Burton pieces together the components with a demonic rigour that belies its sequel status.

A past shines through another layer of the past into a silver screen present that is both familiar and brand-new.

Even though we’re essentially talking about a basic shot-reverse shot exchange, framed in creeping wide angles, juxtaposed with close-ups, the feeling is comparable to watching a getaway heist.

The writer/director also zeroes in on the importance of physical contact for Ruth - something concrete in a world that is now full of things that she can’t always grasp.

There is a careful balance here between the big drama of the premise and the personal dramas experienced by the characters, most of whom pay no particular heed to the wider tragedy unfolding.

While the end result doesn’t fully deliver on its excellent premise, being a little too light of touch, heavy on montage and spare in its scripting, this is nevertheless one of the more accessible cinematic takes on existentialism.

A thoughtful, shrewd examination of the impact of rapidly developing technologies.

At times the discomfort that Harvest causes is not from dirt or despair but the room it leaves for interpretation.

It has all the hallmarks of a production destined for a television mini-series with apparently three other chapters promised by Costner.

This is a tactile retelling, inviting us to imagine the sticky feel of Coca-Cola on hot skin in the sun or the heat of a sheepskin coat and the love that goes with it being passed from mum to daughter ahead of a trip abroad.

The animation is just part of the film’s major selling point, which is unpredictability.

Allowing each woman’s testimony to play out uninterrupted means they gather weight, not just as individual stories but as a meditation on the nature of memory and our desire to preserve it.

Holds your attention to the end.

Although this is set in the Nineties, the gritty feel makes it redolent of Seventies-set thrillers, a mood reinforced by the way that du Welz embeds us in Paul’s life from the start.

It is gorgeous, both to look at and to listen to. It's perhaps Larrain's most accessible film, though that's as much to do with its star as its subject.

A film that is built upon patience and which takes a philosophical rather than judgmental stance.

The Order might not be too original, both in the plot and the character department, but it is very effective, functional movie fun.

Shot over 17 years, it mingles intimate personal moments with visceral concert footage, its musical sequences knitted together with some of the best editing you’re likely to see this year.

The close proximity camerawork employed by Sheldon Chau, coupled with the fact that the frame is often reduced by foreground intrusions, lend Pooja, Sir an intense and often claustrophobic feel.

he film does everything right in its portrayal of a character on the run... the characters are searingly real.

There’s also an emperor’s new clothes feeling to the general style, look closely and there's very little there.

Almodóvar goes all out with the delights fashion has to offer, bright colours, the joy of transformation - because it is never too late for sartorial metamorphosis.

Before making the film, Truffaut spent considerable time with Hitchcock, who's style of filming and fascination with nature's dark side is echoed here.

What emerges is a carefully calibrated, bleak but elegiac picture of an environment where people are being forced to perform rather than allowed to live on their own terms.

Maura Delpero’s multi-layered drama sees its heroine growing up and coming to understand the world in new ways at the same time as the village itself shifts, not altogether willingly, into the modern era.

Cassigoli and Kauffman capture the muscle of family life as it bends, stretches and, from time to time strains, to accommodate all of its members.