Sam Peckinpah was already an experienced director (and screenwriter) before he came to make his first feature The Deadly Companions in 1961. He had worked extensively in television, usually on Western shows such as Gunsmoke and The Westerner. The Deadly Companions was produced by its star Margaret O’Hara, for whom Peckinpah claims he worked as a hired hand. He was allowed very little input in the writing and thus it lacks his typically strong authorial signature.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Both thriller and comedy, Hallam Foe is an enticing coming-of-age film about love, grief and redemption. Directed by David Mackenzie (Young Adam), and based on the novel by Peter Jinks, it’s dominated by Jamie Bell’s exciting performance as the title character – a screwed-up teenager addicted to voyeurism.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Set in rural France, the film is a subtle thriller about a sound recordist, Charlotte (Emilie Dequenne), whose mother (Ludmila Mikaël) is murdered in her home.The thriller narrative has a supernatural dimension as the recorded voices of the past, which ultimately lead Charlotte to the murderer, take the story beyond reality and beyond the conventions of the genre.
Review by Lindsay Tudor

At 12:08pm on December 22, 1989, the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, fled the capital city of Bucharest in the face of overwhelming protests against his authoritarian regime. That moment is heralded as the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc country, and the beginning of an uncertain transition towards democracy. Corneliu Porumboiu’s Caméra d’Or winner for best debut feature, 12.08 East of Bucharest, is a sparsely elegant, humorous film that reflects on those events sixteen years on.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Famed for his stylish virtuosity, To certainly does not disappoint in PTU. His Hong Kong is all slick urban spaces and metallic surfaces, entirely deserted but for the police and the gangsters, so sanitised as to be slightly unreal.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Perfectly adapted to the hour-long soap-opera structure, produced by an impressive team of writers and directors, featuring acting of the highest quality as well as a brilliant soundtrack, Deadwood has truly revolutionised not only the western, but also the TV series in general, and all this despite the casting of Lovejoy as the main character.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer is probably best known in this country for Alice, his full-length animated version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; but for a fuller sense of his achievements it’s to his short films that we should look, as this magnificent triple DVD box set from the BFI makes clear.
Review by Jeff Hilson

It’s as subtle as a slap in the face (of which quite a few are administered in the course of events). And yet . . . Jacques Becker’s terse, down-to-earth 1952 thriller Casque d’or keeps threatening to be art as well as entertainment.
Review by Peter Momtchiloff

In ‘Occupation: Animation & The Visual Arts’, Ian White takes on the subject of animation beyond the screen. He recounts Oskar Fischinger’s experience of xenophobia at Disney and successively examines an animatronic George W. Bush that in a Philip K. Dick-like twist is more convincing than the real George W. Bush.
Review by Philip Winter

A simple love triangle was obviously not enough for the excess-loving Pedro Almodóvar and here we have nothing less than a love pentagon – the titular labyrinth of passion. Tired of orgies, Sexilia wants to fall in love with the exiled son of a fallen Arabic emperor. Unfortunately the newly-fertile Italian princess has the same idea…
Review by Lisa Williams