With a new Artistic Director bringing a breath of fresh air into the festival, the line-up of 69th Edinburgh International Film Festival promises a diverse selection of what’s new in British and American indie cinema, mixed with some classic treats and a vast number of smaller gems from around the world that are unlikely to be coming to a cinema near you any time soon.

Running from 17 to 28 June 2015, the festival opens with homegrown feature film The Legend of Barney Thomson, about a Glasgow barber who accidentally turns into a serial killer, and closes with Scott Graham mild family drama Iona, with plenty of thrills on offer in between.

The Night Moves strand has been notoriously hit-and-miss in recent years, but hopes are high for this year’s selection, which includes Takashi Yamazaki’s adaptation of Japanese body-snatcher manga Parasyte: Part 1, Corin Hardy’s terrifying feature debut The Hallow, Bobby Roe ‘s mockumentary-mixed-horror-fiction The Houses October Built, Hungarian fantasy flick Liza, the Fox-Fairy, Australian futuristic action-adventure Infini, and Turbo Kid, a retro homage to sci-fi/horror films.

We also look forward to the final film by gothic horror master Carlos Enrique Taboada, Poison for the Fairies, which screens as part of a special focus on Mexican cinema alongside Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s <Santa Sangre and 60s supernatural drama Macario.

Standing out from the pack in the New Perspectives strand are low-budget Japanese sex comedy MakeupRoom, Austrian comedy Therapy for a Vampire and two German entries: Kafka’s The Burrow, adapted from the author’s 1923 short story, and Baran bo Odar’s Who Am I – No System Is Safe, starring Tom Schilling (Oh Boy).

Other highlights in the programme include US productions Dope, directed by Rick Famuyiwa, and Jon Watts’ B-movie Cop Car, while Simon Pummell’s sci-fi feature debut Brand New-U and David Blair’s supernatural thriller The Messanger both seem worth checking out from the selection of British films on offer.

In addition to all things new, this year’s main retrospective focuses on Walter Hill’s early career, including his car chase classic The Driver, the suspensful and sweaty Southern Comfort and The Long Riders, Hill’s take on the exploits of the Jesse James and Cole Younger gang. Running parallel to this, the Little Big Screen showcase features an eclectic mix of 1960s and ‘70s American TV movies and offers a rare chance to see Sam Peckinpa’s Noon Wine on the big screen, and a couple of vampire cult classics: Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and John Llewellyn Moxey’s The Night Stalker. Other classic treats include Mark Christopher’s belated director’s cut of his cult disco film, 54, and a beautifully remastered version of Carol Reed’s classic The Third Man, ahead of its limited theatrical run across the UK at the end of this month.

Pamela Jahn

In its 68-year history, Cannes has never been short of stars and scandals but it seems that in more recent years the darker, bolder, more daring films are to be found in the sidebars rather than in the main Competition line-up. And while 2014 proved particularly strong with It Follows, When Animals Dream and Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, a first glance at this year’s programme promises another exciting festival to come.

Opening on 13 May with Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall , there seems to be a focus on French social drama this year, but beyond that, the Competition still includes a number of intriguing works from both new and already established directors. Having won the Un Certain Regard award in 2009 for Dogtooth, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the festival with what might be one of this year’s boldest and presumably funniest sci-fi love stories, The Lobster, while Gomorra-director Matteo Garonne presents his first English-language film with Tale of Tales, based on the collection of fairy tales of 17th century writer Giambattista Basile, who predates more familliar household names such as the Brothers Grimm, Andersen or Perrault. We will also be checking out Todd Haynes’s 50s lesbian melodrama Carol, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, his eagerly awaited follow up to The Great Beauty, as well as the latest offerings form Denis Villeneuve, Sicario, and Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey as an American man lost in Japan’s suicide forest. Plus, we look forward to George Miller’s Mad Max Fury Road and Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, both screening ‘out of competition’.

In addition, this year’s Un Certain Regard strand features new works by exciting directors including Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Journey To The Shore), Brillante Mendoza (Trap) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour), alongside two promising Korean entries: The Shameless by Oh Seung-Uk and Madonna by Shin Suwon. And we also look forward to a special screening of Gaspar Noé’s latest offering Love.

Elsewhere in Cannes, the films that stand out from the line-up in the Directors’ Fortnight programme are US director Jeremy Saulnier’s follows up to his brilliant Blue Ruin with Green Room, a story of punk rockers battling neo-Nazis starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots and Patrick Stewart, and Takashi Miike’s gangster-vampire hybrid thriller Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld, which receives a special presentation. Plus, we will also try to catch at least one of Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights, the three-film contemporary epic from the Portuguese director, which is loosely based on Scheherazade’s tales of ‘One Thousand And One Nights’ but essentially devolves into a chronicle of Portugal’s economic malaise.

Pamela Jahn

Celebrating its 65th anniversary, this year’s Berlinale promises exciting new works from some of our favourite directors. And while the line-up is the usual mixed bag of hits and misses, there is still a great diversity of films on show that go beyond the eye-catching heavyweights, high-profile gala features and prestige ‘Berlinale Special’ screenings, which this year include the likes of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s much talked-about adaptation of EL James’s erotic fiction Fifty Shades of Grey and Anton Corbijn’s James Dean biopic Life.

One of the greatest highlights for us is undoubtedly Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room, screening in the notoriously unpredictable Forum section. Following his ambitious noir gangster ghost tale Keyhole in 2012, Maddin, who has a long-standing relationship with the festival, returns with a film, co-directed by Evan Johnson, that resembles an endless nightmare where plot, characters and locations constantly flow into one another.

Screening in Competition are Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Pablo Larraín’s The Club, Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert and Sabu’s Chasuke’s Journey, alongside other notable contenders such as Alexey German Jr.’s Under Electric Clouds, Radu Jude’s Balkan western Aferim!, and the highly anticipated German entry Victoria, by Sebastian Schipper. Plus, following on the heels of last year’s eccentric Berlinale winner Black Coal, Thin Ice, comes Chinese offering Gone With the Bullets, the second part of Jiang Wen ‘Bullet’ trilogy, which started with his cryptic 2010 comedy gangster drama Let the Bullets Fly.

Among the films we will be checking out in the Forum and Panorama strands are Emyr ap Richard and Darhad Erdenibulag’s quietly radical adaptation of the Kafka classic K, Mitchell Lichtenstein’s haunting game of insecurities Angelica, and Mark Christopher’s rediscovered and extended 54: Director’s Cut. We also look forward to Marcin Malaszczak’s The Days Run Away like Wild Horses over the Hills, which takes its title from a collection of poems Charles Bukowski wrote for his lover, and Matthias Glasner’s Blochin – The Living and the Dead, the pilot to a new German TV crime drama series starring Jürgen Vogel.

As always, the Berlinale will present a vast number of documentaries, this time focusing quite heavily on cult figures and troubled artists including Fassbinder, Nina Simone, Kurt Cobain and Yvonne Rainer, while Joshua Oppenheimer is at hand to present The Look of Silence, his acclaimed follow-up to The Act of Killing. Also of note is B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin about the music, art and chaos in the wild West-Berlin of the 1980s, and Jean-Gabriel Périot’s A German Youth, which looks at the gradual transformation and increasing politicisation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) at the end of the 1960s until they took up armed resistance, constructed entirely from archive footage and audio material.

Germany in the late 60s also features heavily in this year’s Berlinale Classics strand, which offers a rare chance to see Jürgen Böttcher’s Born in ’45 on the big screen, alongside newly restored versions of E. A. Dupont’s Varieté and Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood. Finally, this year’s Retrospective celebrates the 100th anniversary of ‘Glorious Technicolor’ films, with titles including John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven, Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur and Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus.

Pamela Jahn