One of the greatest French filmmakers if not one of the best known, Henri-Georges Clouzot made 11 films between 1942 and 1968. His two most famous works, Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear), winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes, and Les Diaboliques (1955) established his reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’, a comparison based on his mastery of suspense as well as their shared pessimistic world view.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Although it was beset by controversy, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau is one of the most fiercely brilliant works of French cinema. As noir as noir can get, it offers a vision of humanity as devastating as such masterpieces of misanthropic cinema as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed or Fritz Lang’s M.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

The film is a seemingly effortless evocation of the low life in 1940s Paris - a shadowed, intimate, but open world through which ugly and beautiful, young and old, victim, suspect, and pursuer move freely.
Review by Peter Momtchiloff

This brings us to Taxidermia, which is also an ambitious film, with an interest in consumption, and in the odd dislocations of Hungarian history. Taken together, the two films certainly suggest a young director who is onto something, but for me Taxidermia has something of the difficult second album about it.
Review by Stephen Thomson

French film-maker Bruno Dumont has been hyped as a controversial, polarising director during a career that has seen two of his four films win the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. His latest, Flandres, walked away with the award at the 2006 festival to both applause and criticism.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Commissioned for the ‘New Crowned Hope’ festival celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, Daratt is a dry, considered African take on familiar themes of revenge and absolution.
Review by Tom Huddleston

The film is set in Japan’s post-war Ginza district, where unmarried women had few choices: either work in a bar, getting paid to flirt with drunken men, or open a bar of their own. While the issue of outright prostitution is never overtly signaled it remains a potential undercurrent in what effectively is a complete and seemingly successful commodification of a particular kind of erotic femininity; a vision of womanhood where every gesture is studied, where the color of one kimono may affect a night’s turnover.
Review by CB

Asger Leth’s documentary, Ghost Of Cité Soleil, follows these events, concentrating on their impact on 2Pac and Bily; brothers, rivals and gang-leaders in the Cité Soleil slum area of Port-Au-Prince.
Review by Nick Dutfield

Part twisted home-movie, part trash documentary, part screwed-up therapy, John Maringouin’s Running Stumbled navigates the same muddy waters as Jonathan Caouette’s 2003 Tarnation.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

In 2003 director and writer Byambasuren Davaa gave us The Story of the Weeping Camel,,a beautifully constructed documentary based around a Mongolian nomadic family’s newest camel colt. In The Cave of the Yellow Dog, the setting is the same minus the camels and with a different Mongolian family, and Dayaa delivers another slice of humble cinéma vérité.
Review by Jo Overfield