You could call it long conception, short birth. Garin Nugroho imagined Opera Jawa five years ago, but shot it in just two weeks. Production companies weren’t interested in the idea of a modern day opera based on Hindu holy text the Ramayana and set to the sound of gamelan music. But then Peter Sellars – the man behind the staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in the Trump Tower – decided to commission the film for the New Crowned Hope Festival. The festival, funded by the city of Vienna and curated by Sellars, commemorates the 250th Birthday of Mozart, who himself struggled to get his revolutionary work commissioned.
Review by Lisa Williams

Now released in an expanded stand-alone version after the US flop of the ‘Grindhouse’ double bill (which also comprised Robert Rodriguez’ forthcoming Planet Terror), Death Proof is Quentin Tarantino’s latest tongue-in-cheek homage to genre cinema. After heist movies, blaxploitation and martial arts actioners, now it’s the turn of the 70s exploitation flick to get the Tarantino treatment.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Written and directed by the German filmmaker Christian Petzold, Yella is an intriguing, suspenseful mystery with a singular clarity of vision. It is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle and each scene cleverly fits together to reveal a film that is much more than the sum of its parts. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2007 Berlinale, Nina Hoss delivers an excellent performance as the title character – a disillusioned woman desperate to free herself from an oppressive, unsuccessful marriage.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Before embarking on his Hollywood career with a forthcoming remake of his debut film 13 (Tzameti), Géla Babluani has taken the time to collaborate with his father, noted Georgian filmmaker Temur, on a film set in their home country. The film echoes many of the themes of Babluani’s debut, albeit filtered through a lyrical, far less violent and arguably more mature aesthetic: the father reigning in the son’s excesses, at least until the tense climactic sequence.
Review by Tom Huddleston

This silent romantic melodrama from 1929 is reissued by the BFI in a nice print, sharp but with considerable depth and subtlety of shade, including some pleasing murkiness. It is an extravagantly beautiful realisation of royal splendour in Rajasthan, inspired by the ancient Mahabharata but looking like what was then the fairly recent past.
Review by Peter Momtchiloff

It has to be said, sitting in a dark room watching more or less famous people stare at the screen for three minutes does not constitute the most exciting cinematic experience. In fact, like much of Warhol’s work, the Screen Tests are facile and hollow, and yet it is impossible to deny their perverse appeal. And although they are not as notorious as Sleep, Blow Job or Chelsea Girls, the Screen Tests do offer a striking insight into the slippery, ambiguous nature of Warhol’s art.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

The molluscs are subjected to pornographic macroscopic close-up photography exposing labial, clitoral fronds, protusions and sensuous pink umbilicae; Wharton jelly smears; the curlicues and whorls of tentacular mating rituals; the synaesthetic mood pulsing of octopi, a special arm inserted into an orifice… It is reminiscent of an orgasmatron moment in Barbarella or an expanded cinema light show; with jerkier movement and fast editing it could even be Brakhage-esque forensic footage….
Review by Philip Winter

In the 1960s the British New Wave made films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey which told us of the lives of the people who lived in what were then pit-towns and centres of industry. Later, directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh documented the corrosive effect of Thatcherism on those communities. Now the mantle has passed to Shane Meadows.
Review by Sean Price

Although it’s being marketed as the third Ghost in the Shell film, the acronym friendly GitS: S.A.C. – SSS is the most recent (feature-length) episode of the TV series Stand Alone Complex. Based on the same manga by Masamune Shirow that inspired Mamoru Oshii’s two movies, Solid State Society is confusingly being presented as a sequel, although for the casual viewer there are enough connections with the originals both in terms of theme and returning characters to justify this.
Review by Alex Fitch

The Last Winter follows an oil research team based in the untouched Alaskan Arctic planes. Tough and tenacious leader Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) is eager to drill into the rich oil resources that lie below the surface, but he is challenged by environmental expert James Hoffman (James LeGros), who believes the project will wreak havoc on the already fragile terrain. A sense of unease builds within the team after the mysterious disappearance and death of one of its members, and the camp is slowly engulfed in disorientation and paranoia as a ghostly threat starts to take hold of their lives.
Review by Lindsay Tudor