In the second part of our BFI London Film Festival previews, Pamela Jahn, Mark Stafford and John Bleasdale pick out more highlights from this year’s festival line-up.

All Cheerleaders Die (Lucky McKee, Chris Sivertson, 2013)
Anyone who’s suffered through the likes of Head Cheerleader Dead Cheerleader, and Delta Delta Die! will know that the cheerleader-based horror film is a dubious prospect at best, but All Cheerleaders Die is spiky, nasty and massively enjoyable. The first third of Lucky McGee and Chris Sivertson’s film is a tense and unnerving affair, as, after a shattering opening sequence, we follow high-school-outsider Maddy while she infiltrates the cheerleading squad at Blackfoot High with some kind of dark agenda, sowing distrust and disharmony in an already spiteful, brittle environment of ‘bitches’ and ‘dogs’. The paranoia builds, and there are no especially sympathetic characters, only a sense that something dreadful is going to happen, which it duly does, as tempers flare during a party scene. After this the film changes, via some witchy business, into an arguably less interesting, but undeniably more fun, out-and-out black comedy horror ride. It’s as if Afterschool morphed into Jennifer’s Body, but a lot more entertaining than that sounds. It’s sharp stuff, with quotable dialogue and a game cast giving it their all. The sexual politics may be debatable, and assassinating airheads may be like shooting fish in a barrel, but sod it. This is great. MS

Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the talk of the town from the moment of the first press screening until long after the award ceremony. Although most critics immediately fell in love with this oddly seductive, three-hour lesbian love saga, soon after taking home the main prize, the film was slammed by others for some oddly positioned camera angles focusing on the central character’s arse and the lengthy scenes of real-looking sex between her and her female lover, allegedly all designed for the male gaze. What’s more, Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel the film was inspired by, has publicly expressed her disappointment about Kechiche’s adaptation, describing the sex scenes as ‘ridiculous’ and comparing them to porn. What’s true is that Kechiche has a tendency to keep the camera pointed and rolling just a little longer and deeper than most directors would have done when it comes to depicting Adèle’s lust for life, love and home-made spaghetti.

On the other hand, the sex aside, there simply aren’t many films that manage to keep you hooked for that sort of running time on not much more than the coming-of-age of a middle-class, high-school girl who instantly and desperately falls for a foxy art student, from the moment she spots her on the street until their painful and moving break-up as young adults. That of course is in no small part thanks to the two leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos (Carré blanc) and Léa Seydoux, who play their parts with utter conviction, guided by a script that allows them to find their own voices. PJ

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
The latest offering from Joel and Ethan Coen was one of the hottest tickets in Cannes this year, and deservedly so. Inside Llewyn Davis tells the heartfelt story of an itinerant, relentlessly failing and unashamedly self-pitying folk singer in 1960s New York, loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, who was at the centre of the Greenwich Village music scene. Adored by many at the time, Van Ronk never had his big breakthrough, just as Davis (Oscar Isaac) struggles to keep his head above water with occasional gigs in a tiny club called Gaslight, and with the help of his peevish ex-girlfriend (Carey Mulligan) who might, or might not be, expecting his child. But that’s only one of the many problems leading to his downfall, which culminates in a trip to Chicago to visit the legendary folk club The Gate of Horn.

To a large extent, the Coens are working in known territory: a bunch of flawed, but strangely intriguing characters, dry-as-dusk dialogue and some wonderful music supervised by T-Bone Burnett, fused together into an impressively subtle, dark but magical character study that says as much about shattered dreams and the trouble with art as it does about the mystery of life and luck. What makes the film uniquely special, however, is Isaac’s riveting performance (both playing the guitar and acting), and who makes his precariously unlikable character unexpectedly compelling, as he wanders through the streets and other people’s lives, and shines whenever he’s on stage. PJ

Watch the trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis:

Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)
Steven Knight’s second film in one year – the first was the Jason Statham thriller Hummingbird – is a brilliant minimalist piece of cinéma de chambre, in this case the chamber being the titular protagonist’s car. Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is driving alone from Birmingham to Croydon, away from his his wife and two teenage sons, from his work as a senior site supervisor on a huge building project, and from his life as he knows it so far. Armed only with the car phone and some tissues and cough medicine for his head cold, Locke attempts to repair the damage even as he is doing it. Boasting a wonderful performance of unshowy maturity by Hardy and driven by a superbly detailed script by Knight, Locke is a film that is never hampered by its own rigorously applied confines.

The emotional moments are hard won and brilliantly delivered. Although credit should also be given to the vocal presence of Ruth Wilson, Olivia Colman and Andrew Scott, Hardy carries the weight of the film with aplomb. To add to the difficulties of holding the screen on his own for the duration of the film, he also adopts a Welsh accent, which is entirely in keeping with the character, who makes poetry out of hard work and who desperately struggles to maintain his values and integrity even when they will effectively destroy him. JB

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
After Jarmusch’s last film, The Limits of Control, it seemed that another great director was close to losing his genius, but there is a welcome sense of rebirth about Only Lovers Left Alive from the moment it opens. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston make for a brilliant pair of vampire lovers who have been truly, madly, deeply in love for centuries, yet are now living apart. Swinton’s resilient and enigmatic Eve resides in lush Tangiers while Hiddleston’s disheartened underground musician, Adam, is holed up in the outskirts of derelict Detroit. When their longing for each other becomes unbearable, Eve decides to take on the difficult journey (she can only travel at night) to reunite with Adam, but soon after the couple are back together, their gently hedonistic idyll of non-murderous blood and old vinyl is disrupted by the arrival of Eve’s unnerving, uncontrollable younger sister (Mia Wasikowska).

Nothing much happens in Jarmusch’s sensuous fantasy of night and nostalgia, apart from the fact that the pair are running short of the sort of pure, uncontaminated blood that they now need to keep them going. But watching these two archetypal outcasts, still in full possession of their animal instincts, as they roam around trying to blend in with their surroundings, is an undemanding, irresistible pleasure. PJ

Watch the trailer for Only Lovers Left Alive:

Sacro GRA (Gianfranco Rosi, 2013)
Picking up the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival a few weeks ago, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Sacro GRA takes the Roman ring road – the GRA, the Grande Raccordo Anulare – as a fairly arbitrary rope with which to lasso a hodgepodge of eccentrics and colourful characters into an at-times funny and occasionally moving, but oddly unrevealing picture of a series of places. Rosi has gathered an eel fisherman, an ambulance worker, a monkish tree surgeon, a seedy nobleman, a father and daughter chatting in their emergency housing, and bar-top dancers preparing in the dingy back room of a grubby bar. The road passes close by them, but serves little purpose except a tenuous connection and perhaps a structuring absence. The road is the audience that passes by these lives but doesn’t stop to listen, perhaps. As with previous work – El Sicario, Room 164 and the American based Below Sea Level – Rosi maintains a neutral space of bland observation, but sometimes the neutrality feels like a pose. As with Le Quattro Volte, which feels like a rural companion piece to Rosi’s documentary, there is an awkward feel of an essayist presenting his supporting evidence too neatly on the page. The hair-in-the-gate spontaneity is missing and some of the effects realised are done so neatly that there is a suspicion Rosi is filming his characters with specific traits in mind: the laughable photo-novel and the horny-handed hero of toil. JB

Pamela Jahn, Mark Stafford, John Bleasdale

With this year’s 57th edition of the BFI London Film Festival just around the corner, Pamela Jahn, Mark Stafford, John Bleasdale and Pierre Kapitaniak preview some of the feature films screening in cinemas across London during the first week of the LFF, including Ari Folman’s bold, riveting and unmissable The Congress, Ivan Sen’s Australian western Mystery Road and Jia Zhangke’s angry, strikingly stylised A Touch of Sin, and J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, which features one of Robert Redford’s finest performances.

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
Although director Jia Zhangke officially denied in interviews that his close relationship with Office Kitano was more than simply based on financial support for this production, A Touch of Sin feels like a ferocious piece of work very much in the same vein as the best films by the Japanese director and friend, albeit intensified by the social-political backdrop addressed here. Based on four real-life criminal cases (including a murder, suicide and a couple of killing sprees), Zhangke’s protagonists represent a cross section of contemporary Chinese society, from different areas of the country. Seen from that perspective, the film, which deservedly won Zhangke the award for Best Screenplay, is a sanguinary, tense investigation into the Chinese economic miracle and the brutalising effect it has on the lives of ordinary people at the bottom end of the ladder, who ultimately can’t help but vent their rage, rising up against authority, in a world not theirs. Likewise, on a visual level, A Touch of Sin is a powerful war of the senses, in the way the stylised violence seems gently aligned with the character’s innermost thoughts and emotions, enabling the audience to savour a similar cold adrenaline rush as those wuxia and Lady Vengeance-type characters on screen. PJ

Watch the trailer for A Touch of Sin:

Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, 2013)
Alex van Warmerdam returns with Borgman, which masterfully plunges into the uncanny without ever fully acknowledging the supernatural dimension of the plot. Indeed, Camiel Borgman (played by Jan Bijvoet, recently seen in Alabama Munro) might well be the devil, as suggested by the Bible-like quotation opening the film: ‘And they descended upon earth to strengthen their ranks.’

The feeling of something otherworldly is introduced from the opening scene, in which two hunters, accompanied by a Catholic priest, hunt down Borgman and his followers, who are living in underground shelters in the forest (reminiscent of the Black Man in Warmerdam’s The Northerners). On the run from them, Borgman arrives at an upper-middle-class house asking for a bath and gets sorely beaten by the owner, while the wife takes pity and shelters him. From then on things go wrong, and we soon realise that Borgman is definitely more than just a tramp, as he turns into a literal night-mare, such as pictured by Henry Fuseli. Once again, in his very idiosyncratic style, Warmerdam combines social criticism of the bourgeoisie with mystical angst, leaving the audience to weave the threads of interpretation as they please. PK

Watch the trailer for Borgman:

The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013)
Opening this year’s Director’s Fortnight, Ari Folman’s follow up to his 2008 Cannes competition entry Waltz with Bashir is an idiosyncratic masterpiece, highly ambitious in its scale and complexity, and fuelled with dazzling animated beauty. In a daringly intimate performance, Robin Wright plays herself, an acclaimed actress just past her prime with a market value diminished to zero, her previous stardom being long buried in Hollywood history. When her agent, Al (Harvey Keitel), tells her she’s being given one last chance by her studio, Miramount, Robin reluctantly agrees to a meeting, unknowing what this final offer entails. The plan is to motion-capture Wright, to copy her body, feelings, memories, and gestures in order to create a digital alter ego that can easily be adjusted to fit into any blockbuster, TV show or commercial as required by the studio. As part of the deal that promises her both a generous pay-off and the guarantee of eternal youth on screen, the real Robin Wright must retire with no claim as to how her virtual self is being used in the future. At first, she refuses, but family constraints force her to reconsider.

So far, The Congress might appear as a vicious, darkly cynical take on the movie industry in the digital age and how Hollywood treats its ageing goddesses. What then happens, however, about 50 minutes into the film, is best seen first-hand. Loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, and again combining animation and live action to puzzling effect, Folman jumps forward 20 years to find the real Wright aged and out of business, while her alter ego has become one of the biggest action heroines on screen as ‘Rebel Robot Robin’. Invited to Miramount’s Futurological Congress, the actress must pass into a strange animated zone, which opens an entirely new, imaginary universe of its own, crowded with celebrity doubles who escape their daily misery through drug-induced hallucinations; it’s a place that visually blends the style of 1930s Betty Boop cartoons and the trippy aesthetic of Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World. At the same time, Folman slows down the action to plunge into something darker, deeper, more inventive and more existential than merely teasing the Hollywood system to the core. Soused in gorgeous imagery and surreal, intoxicated melancholy, the second half of The Congress meanders gracefully between philosophical, religious and ideological reflections on the human condition, yet despite minor flaws, never loses sight of its original premise. The film is a fiercely original, bold and riveting meditation on the future of the silver screen and the stars that make it shine. PJ

Mystery Road (Ivan Sen, 2013)
Ivan Sen’s fine, modern-dress Australian western impresses as much for what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. It’s unhurried, unprettified, and has a sparse soundtrack with minimal music; not everything is explained, and much is left unsaid. In other words it’s a genre film made for adults – remember them?

Aaron Pederson plays a man alone, an aboriginal copper, treated as the enemy by his own people, and hardly ‘one of the boys’ in the small police department he has recently returned to in outback Queensland. Tasked with a job nobody else wants – investigating the murder of a teenage aboriginal girl – he begins to uncover some murky business involving drugs and prostitution, in which his own force, and, more queasily, his own abandoned daughter, may be involved. Clearly headed into troubled waters, and with nobody to back him up, he begins to look more and more vulnerable under those wide-open skies…

The set-up is entirely conventional for any number of thrillers, but there are no Hollywood faces here, no extraneous action sequences, no master criminals either. The details of life in this harsh environment are well observed, and the atmosphere of menace is well sustained right up to the brilliantly delivered final confrontation. All the performances are pitched just right, with Hugo Weaving especially good value as the wayward and worrying leader of the drug squad (in terrifying double denim!). It looks great, too, especially the night sequences, where the land turns black, and the horizon is a riot of oranges and reds, with human figures picked out in sick green neon. Photography by Mr. Sen as well. Clever boy. Gold stars. MS

Watch the trailer for Mystery Road:

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Jonathan Glazer’s return to feature films after an almost decade-long absence, Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as a predatory alien who prowls Glaswegian streets in a white transit van, searching for young men who will not be missed. Mixing arthouse visuals of mesmerizing abstraction with naturalistic (and occasionally incomprehensible) street scenes and occasional lurches into Lynchian horror, the film escapes the gravitational pull of its genre and the dubious slightness – and potential misogyny – of its storyline. As with Johansson’s victims, we are beguiled by the look of the film, its self-confessedly empty eroticism and its otherworldly perspective on mundane British life. Whereas the criminally underrated Birth riffed on Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Under the Skin ditches the lightweight satire of the Michael Faber source novel to absorb the influence of Nic Roeg – The Woman Who Fell to Earth if you will – and create a disturbing trip into the other. JB

Watch the trailer for Under the Skin:

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (Denis Côté, 2013)
Canadian critic-turned-director Denis Côté’s eccentric Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (Vic et Flo ont vu un ours) starts off promisingly, but gradually loses momentum, as well as character depth, before an unexpectedly superb, if bitchy, ending. Pierrette Robitaille as Victoria, who has been discharged early from prison for a life sentence, and Romane Bohringer as Vic’s former cell mate and now lover, Florence, who has her own agenda for consistently soft-selling Vic’s mounting fear that she will eventually drop her, both give convincing performances as the outlaw couple trying to make a new start somewhere in the Canadian forest. But Côté doesn’t quite manage to keep the viewer interested in his deceptive directing choices and the film’s enigmatic atmosphere, so much so that one doesn’t really care anymore when the trap that has been carefully laid out eventually snaps shut. PJ

Watch the trailer for Vic + Flo Saw a Bear:

Pamela Jahn, Mark Stafford, John Bleasdale, Pierre Kapitaniak

Although the programme of the 48th edition of the KVIFF was packed and looked as exciting as ever, unfortunately there was only time for a fleeting visit this year. The always judicious picks of festival favourites from the Berlinale and Cannes included The Congress, The Great Beauty, Behind the Candelabra, Frances Ha, A Touch of Sin and Harmony Lessons to name a few, in addition to the premiere of A Field in England, a day before it became the first film to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on home entertainment formats and free TV in the UK. There was also a long-overdue Jerry Schatzberg retrospective, including the 1970s New York-set heroin romance Panic in Needle Park alongside the newly digitally remastered Scarecrow, not to mention the wealth of new offerings from Central and Eastern Europe. And even with only four days there, the small selection of highlights below proves that Karlovy Vary remains a great hunting ground for the unexpected.

Halley (Sebastián Hofmann, 2012)
By far the most striking and original film I saw, Mexican filmmaker Sebastián Hoffman’s debut feature is essentially a zombie film wrapped in awkwardly stylish, realistic yet surreal art-house trappings. The horror comes in the form of an unnamed, seemingly terminal illness that has taken control of the body of lonely security guard Beto (Alberto Trujillo), who meticulously observes the strange wounds spreading from head to toe all over his skin. Ashamed and desperate when he can no longer hide his disease, Beto goes to extremes to keep the deterioration at bay, but he soon realises that hope is vain and eventually holes up in his flat, surrendering to his disturbing physical condition.

Driven by a keen sense of the grotesque, Hofmann has crafted an increasingly outlandish film that skilfully utilises and subverts genre conventions without ever failing to approach his troubled protagonist with genuine respect rather than mere compassion or exploitation. Watching Beto quietly wasting away is painful, but seeing the hint of a friendship developing with the woman who runs the gym where he works before witnessing the events that follow his last desperate attempt to cling to life is nearly heart-breaking. Halley is an intelligent, haunting and melancholy tale of the deep, unrewarding human desire for love, intimacy and acceptance, and the weird dreams that often come with it.

Watch the trailer for Halley:

Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Fruitvale Station, which premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section earlier this year, is one of those films that you watch not so much for its artistic refinement as for the political urgency it radiates. Nonetheless, debut filmmaker Ryan Googler shows a remarkably steady and not too heavy hand as he takes the audience through the real-life events of New Year’s morning 2009, when 22-year-old Oscar Grant was killed in a senseless police shooting at Fruitvale rapid transit stop in Oakland, California.

The super-low-budget drama chronicles the last hours in the life of the young black man (intensely played by Michael B. Jordan) who, newly out of prison, is all set to make big changes in the year ahead: no more drug dealing, no more trouble, being a better son to his doting mother, a better partner to his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and, most importantly, a more reliable father to his own daughter, starting off by taking Sophina out to see the Bay Area fireworks that night. But despite his best intentions, plans change when the police line him and his friends down on the ground against a concrete wall on the subway platform for all the wrong reasons. The real-life shaky cell phone clip at the beginning of the film, recorded in the station just before Grant’s death, not only gives a sense of foreboding to the events, but adds to the film’s aim to make Oscar human – a real person, far from being perfect, but utterly undeserving of the destiny thrust upon him. Powerful, angry and sad, Fruitvale Station exerts a subtly gripping tension that is abruptly energised as the fatal gunshot is fired, leaving the film lingering in the mind for some time after the credits roll.

Watch the trailer for Fruitvale Station:

My Dog Killer (Mira Fornay, 2012)
One would have thought that, by now, the appetite for bleak, stark East European social dramas with non-professional actors, had waned, but Mira Fornay’s Slovak-Czech film My Dog Killer, one of the three Tiger Award winners at Rotterdam earlier this year, proves that the formula still appeals to some. After setting her debut feature, Foxes (2009), in Dublin, this time the director works on her home turf as she follows the apathetic 18-year-old Marek (Adam Mihal) and his dog, Killer, through their daily struggles in a dead-end village near the Slovak–Moravian border, where all-embracing anger, dodgy dealings and open, anti-Roma racism are the order of the day. When Marek finds out that he has a half-brother with gypsy blood in his veins, he doesn’t think twice before taking drastic action. But although Mihal delivers a convincing lead performance, in the end, the only thing that one really cares about is Killer. This is a drab, hate-filled film that might well tick all the right boxes to become a strong presence on this year’s festival circuit, but anyone looking for some fresh, less formulaic and more inventive drama may want to look elsewhere.

Sources of Life (Oskar Roehler, 2013)
Oskar Roehler’s last film, Jew Suss – Rise and Fall (Jud Süss – Film ohne Gewissen, 2010), which reimagines the story of the making of Veit Harlan’s 1940 Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss, was a dead loss to say the least. So it was a relief to see him back on form with Sources of Life (Quellen des Lebens), an adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel Herkunft. In its ambitious 174 minutes, the film recounts the story of a German family spanning three generations as they face up to the country’s post-war experience. Setting off in the late 1940s, we first meet Erich (Jürgen Vogel), a soldier devoted to Nazism, who returns home several years after the war to win back his estranged wife and make a new start by establishing the first garden gnome factory in Germany. The business flourishes, but his son Klaus (Moritz Bleibtreu) doesn’t share his fine commercial acumen and instead sets out to become an aspiring author, only to realise with jealousy that the woman he loves is a far more gifted writer than he is, but equally useless when it comes to raising their child. The latter part of the film follows their son Robert as he tries to find love and, more importantly, ‘himself’ during Germany’s eventful 1970s, when the Baader-Meinhof Group rocked the country’s democracy with a series of increasingly violent terrorist attacks. Building on his notably odd sense of humour and the three love stories at the heart of the film, Roehler manages to weave an interesting ironic commentary into his portray of West Germany, but how much that will appeal to an international audience less familiar with the detail of the country’s bumpy post-war period is anyone’s guess.

Pamela Jahn

Beyond its general focus on British and international, independent and arthouse cinema, the Edinburgh International Film Festival offered two notable retrospectives this year: a comprehensive showcase of Jean Grémillon’s films from the late 1920s until the late 1950s, including feature films as well as shorts, and a smaller selection of films by Hollywood legend Richard Fleischer. The official selection, on the other hand, was a mixed bag yet again, with only a few discoveries to be made. Below, Pamela Jahn and David Cairns take a look across the various EIFF programme strands and report on the highs and lows of this year’s 67th edition of the festival.

Taboor (Vahid Vakilifar, 2012)

Not everybody’s idea of science fiction, this Iranian object of beauty follows a depressed exterminator around a nocturnal city, sometimes at great length. The shots are extraordinarily beautiful, and the intrigue behind his lonely perambulations keeps one watching. Why does he live in a tinfoil-lined house? Is he really at danger from microwave radiation? Confident in its own stylistic language, the film even manages to pull off a perverse bit with a dwarf that doesn’t seem like a Lynch crib, attaining its own shade of askew elegance. DC

7 Boxes (Juan Carlos Maneglia, Tana Schémbori, 2012)

Although easily mistaken as a ‘teen movie’, due to its fun, high-energy yet light-hearted approach, 7 Boxes is a riveting, amiable ‘easy-job-gone-terribly-wrong’ action ride that is worth almost every second of its 100-minute running time. The film follows 17-year-old Victor (Celso Franco) through Asunción’s jam-packed urban market, where he makes a poor living as a delivery boy with a wheelbarrow, while in his dreams, he is soon to become famous in Hollywood. When he’s offered the chance to take care of seven mysterious boxes with unknown contents from a butcher’s shop, in exchange for 100 dollars, guarding them with his life while police search the place, he simply can’t say no. But he soon regrets his decision as he finds himself chased by both the police and a bunch of unscrupulous gangsters, in their search for their macabre goods. Although danger is largely played out in shrewd twists instead of serious scares, 7 Boxes makes deft use of its bustling setting and the market’s tangled net of loose and calculated social connections to drive its story along. A small, terribly engaging film with a bitter-sweet heart that is more satisfying than much of the standard Hollywood action fair. PJ

Watch the trailer for 7 Boxes:

Constructors (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, 2012)

A fractured family have one week to build a house on a patch of land they own, or else the state will take it away. Alternately funny and sad, this haunting Kazakh film is most notable for the way it transforms its wasteland setting, dotted with building sites, into a vision of ineffable beauty, in which back-lit plastic sheeting and old, half-perished water bottles glow like alien artefacts. DC

My Dog Killer (Mira Fornay, 2012)

One would have thought that, by now, the general appetite for bleak, stark East European social dramas with non-professional actors and no hope to be found anywhere, has somewhat waned, but Mira Fornay’s Slovak–Czech film My Dog Killer, one of the three Tiger Award winners at Rotterdam earlier this year, proves that the formula still works. After setting her debut feature, Foxes (2009), in Dublin, this time the director works in her home turf as she follows the apathetic 18-year-old Marek (Adam Mihal) and his dog, Killer, through his daily struggles in a dead-end village near the Slovak–Moravian border, where an all-embracing anger, dodgy dealings and open, anti-Roma racism are the order of the day. When Marek finds out that he has a half-brother with gypsy blood in his veins, he doesn’t think twice before taking drastic action. Though Mihal delivers a strong lead performance (with Marek making the most of his screen presence), in the end the only thing one really cares for is poor Killer. This is a drab, hate-filled film which might well tick all the right boxes to become a solid force on this year’s circuit, but anyone looking for some fresh, less formulaic and more inventive drama may want to investigate further. PJ

Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966)

The Richard Fleischer retrospective explored the Hollywood handyman’s knack for exploiting visual possibilities in any story. There was no film to represent his graceful use of 3D, alas, but several films showcased his Cinemascope compositions, and this one adds psychedelic special effects to the mix, as a team of secret agents and scientists pilot a miniaturised submarine through the circulatory system of a comatose Russian defector. Their mission: to destroy a blood clot in his brain with a laser gun. It’s all absurd, and exploited better in Joe Dante’s Innerspace, but this movie does have a cheeky sense of humour hidden away, and embraces its own corniest elements quite knowingly. There’s an early appearance by Raquel Welch, who plays a surgeon’s assistant and doesn’t disgrace herself: she’s not exactly convincing in the role, but neither is she the calculated insult to womanhood embodied by Denise Richards, nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. DC

The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013)

James Wan’s follow-up to Insidious is perhaps too similar, despite a 1970s setting and a thin veneer of faux-documentary posing. But so what? The shocks are guaranteed to lift cinema audiences out of their seats, the suspense in the early stages before the serious manifestations is quite tantalising, and the movie is cheekily good-natured even as it scares the bejesus out of you.

The one real misstep is the citing of the Salem witch trials as backstory for the (barely explained) supernatural happenings. Don’t haul in a real-life, historical tragedy in which the women tortured and killed were innocent, Mr Wan! This is a filmmaker with a serious talent for playing an audience via misdirection and timing, and all he needs to make a really good film is the deeper application of his intelligence. DC

Watch the trailer for The Conjuring:

Betrayal (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2012)

Sleek arthouse mystery and anomie from Kirill Serebrennikov, director of Crush (2009). Two couples are intertwined in a web of infidelity, suspicion, attempted revenge-sex and acts of God. I found the ending unsatisfactory, but until then, this is a quite remarkable exercise in compelling the audience’s attention via slow-burn mystery, left-field surprises, noir glamour and loooong dramatic pauses. Breathtakingly lovely in its deep colours and spectacularly framed urban landscapes, and very much in love with its female characters’ bodies, in particular with red-headed Franziska Petri’s glassy stare. DC

Outpost 3: Rise of the Spetsnaz (Kieran Parker, 2013)

The latest sequel in the Scottish-shot, zombie-Nazi franchise, Outpost 3: Rise of the Spetsnaz plays more like a video game than ever. The most obvious, long-running problems of a disinterest in character and a sloppy attitude to its own concepts continues to blight these movies, with a hateful bunch of Russian elite soldiers battling no less horrible German Nazis and their mad science experiments in a low-budget bunker. The Nazis are led by a spectacularly unconvincing, amateur-dramatics Christoph Waltz knock-off, and everybody speaks with corny ‘Allo ‘Allo! accents.

The monsters seem to be merely deformed Germans this time, supposedly superpowered but actually defeatable by ordinary men, so what’s the point? When one of the ’heroes’ gets treated by the fiendish radiation device, some measure of complexity hovers shimmering on the horizon, but he’s soon killed off before anything interesting can result. The brutal action and carefully harnessed production values are fine, but the artistic bankruptcy is palpable. Surely this series has hit a reinforced concrete wall? DC

Watch the trailer for Outpost 3:

L’Etrange Monsieur Victor (Jean Grémillon, 1937)

The Jean Grémillon retrospective provided many treats, including this indefinable 1937 drama. When a gangster is murdered by fence Raimu, innocent Pierre Blanchar is jailed for the crime. Raimu cannot enjoy his bourgeois life with Blanchar behind bars, and when the convict breaks out, Raimu shelters him in his own home. And now Blanchar, spurned by his own trampy wife (Viviane Romance), is falling for Raimu’s (Madeleine Renaud, who plays jilted lovers and neglected wives in a startling number of these films). Everybody in this film is tortured by guilt of one kind or another, except the really guilty ones. Making it odder, the script provides plenty of humour for Raimu, a boisterous and inventive comedy player who can’t resist making the most of it, so the tone is violently uneven. But it’s all beautifully done, with Grémillon’s usual documentary attention to the details and textures of small-town life, Blanchar looking soulful and tortured with great cheekbones, and Renaud and the brazen Romance embodying the kind of parts they excelled at: angel and demon, respectively. DC

Festival report by Pamela Jahn and David Cairns