Too often put in the same bag as the cynical, Hollywood-engineered wave of blaxploitation flicks it influenced, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is pure, unadulterated ghetto anger that burns as fiercely now as when it was made over thirty years ago.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Pressure was financed by the BFI (a very small budget too) but then shelved for two years due to the controversial depiction of police brutality. It tells the story of a British-born teenager, Tony (Herbert Norville), who leaves school with good ‘O’ levels (‘the star of the class’ according to his friend) but meets with thinly veiled racism and rejection when he tries to get a job. He is left to find his own way between his friends’ petty criminality (shop-lifting tinned food) and his brother Colin’s involvement with Black Power politics.
Review by Paul Huckerby

In 2006 during an interview with Mark Kermode for the BBC’s Culture Show, Werner Herzog was famously shot with an air rifle, apparently by a crazed fan – not that surprising perhaps for LA and, if the director’s own words are to be believed, not that surprising for Herzog himself. The occasion of the interview was the release of Grizzly Man, one of Herzog’s more understated ‘documentaries’ and I kept wondering at the time whether the shooting incident might not have been staged to give Grizzly Man some kind of notoriety, the kind of notoriety that attached itself in the early eighties to Fitzcarraldo which is now re-released on DVD, accompanied by Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a ‘making of’ documentary, to mark its 25th anniversary.
Review by Jeff Hilson

Billed as science fiction but bearing closer relation to the work of Chris Marker and even David Attenborough than Spielberg or Lucas, the film utilises footage shot on the space shuttle STS-43, along with haunting images photographed beneath the polar ice cap, all loosely held together with a rambling, delusional voiceover by actor Brad Dourif.
Review by Tom Huddleston

onedotzero brand themselves as one of the UK’s leading promoters of contemporary digital moving image, both through the international film festivals that they stage and through their onedotzero_select DVD series. The fifth edition, released June 4th, is a captivating compilation of work, including short films and music promos, that combines both high-quality live action and innovative, often humorous animation.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Rolf de Heer’s charming Ten Canoes, set among the Yolngu community and billed as the first feature in the Aboriginal language, starts as it means to go on, humorously deflating myths and conventions. Over the magnificent opening views of Arnhem Land in Northern Australia the jovial narrator is heard saying ‘Once upon a time in a faraway land’, only to stop and add, laughing, ‘I’m only joking’.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Having trashed his hotel room in the throes of this dream, Berlot is rescued by the ‘Marquis’, whose anachronistic costume and tendency to gales of insane laughter go largely unremarked by those around him. At this point, there are promising signs: the Marquis’ coach and horses trundling preposterously along the motorway is nice.
Review by Stephen Thomson

Like all of Cassavetes’ best work, Opening Night goes beyond being merely a self-reflexive investigation into the perils of cinema making. Made immediately after what may be Cassavetes’ best film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), the film tells the story of the week or so of out-of-town performances before the New York opening night of a play entitled ‘The Second Woman’ – in which Myrtle, who plays the title role of a woman cast aside in favour of a younger one, becomes unhinged after the death of a young female fan one night outside the theatre.
Review by CB

The same can by no means be said of Masumura’s Red Angel, which is a much more perverse though, for very different reasons, no less conflicted account of the plight of a nurse from Tokyo working in a series of field hospitals in China during the 1939 Sino-Japanese war.
Review by Jeff Hilson

From the very first frame, Masumura’s Blind Beast is as visually arresting as it is morally dubious, and it doesn’t let up pursuing its own preposterous logic for a second from then on in. What more can you ask of a film?
Review by Stephen Thomson