Controversial indie auteur Harmony Korine returns with his most unexpected work yet: a giddy, hysterical comic fantasy of faith and friendship lost and found.
Review by Tom Huddleston

Zombie king George A. Romero returns to the sub-genre he created, with gripping if somewhat predictable results.
Review by Lindsay Tudor

What remains true though, is that culture shapes our perception of femininity, a perception that constantly fluctuates between idealisation and demonisation. Both extremes are represented in Céline Sciamma’s compelling Water Lilies, a smart and refreshing cinematic study of nascent womanhood that throws us (and this doesn’t necessarily exclude male audiences) right back into the purgatory of teenage love and sexual confusion.
Review by Pamela Jahn

Produced by Guillermo del Toro, The Orphanage is the debut feature of young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. A ghost story set in a Spanish orphanage, it has much in common with its mentor’s masterful The Devil’s Backbone, not least in its thoughtful use of the horror genre to explore the troubled mindset of a character confronted with loss and death.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Tian Zhuangzhuang’s latest film to date, The Go Master, is now opening at the ICA as the centrepiece of the China in London 2008 film programme, which features a long overdue retrospective of Tian’s small but ground-breaking body of work.
Review by Pamela Jahn

Music halls, gas lamps, cemeteries, public toilets, vaults and catacombs, the horse and cart – all were preserved for eternity by Fletcher in ink and word as they slowly disappeared from view. His books, long charity shop staples, are now quite collectible, and this film version of his idiosyncratic city vision was previously only available in samizdat bootleg editions passed round by collectors. Recently adopted by thoughtful popsters St Etienne as an adjunct to their Finisterre project, it finally gets a well-deserved clean-up and reissue on DVD.
Review by Mark Pilkington

Made in 1926, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was Alfred Hitchcock’s third completed feature and the one he considered to be his first real film. In spite of his inexperience, Hitchcock demonstrates a flair for building tension and creating an evocative atmosphere. This early silent establishes some of the idiosyncracies he later became famous for, notably his cameo appearances and his fixation on blonde actresses.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

This apparent contradiction informs 1960’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli. The film charts the lives of an ordinary peasant family from Southern Italy as they move to Milan, and this concentration on normal working-class Italians made it central to that country’s neorealist movement. Yet Rocco is also operatic in scale and emotion.
Review by Pat Long

The idea of remaking Louis Feuillade’s legendary serial Les Vampires, with Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung in the role of the catsuited thief Irma Vep, is brilliant. What a shame then that instead of really going for it, director Olivier Assayas decided to play it safe and opted for a film-within-the-film about the impossibility of such a project.
Review by Virginie Sélavy