The world of the film is one that combines Tales of Hoffman and 1984, where a totalitarian regime has literally removed the voice of the people. When characters in this world speak, letters appear in the air in front of their faces and all the contrivances of speech are given a visual alternative.
Review by Alex Fitch

Terror’s Advocate is a chilling study of one man’s role in the entangled web of twentieth-century terrorism. Told with the dramatic pacing of a political thriller, Barbet Schroeder’s intense and compelling documentary features an astonishing cast of characters, from resistance fighters to terrorists to war criminals, who have been witnesses and participants in decades of political upheaval, all linked by the same lawyer – Jacques Vergès.
Review by Sarah Cronin

Amalric plays Simon Kessler, an in-house recruiter and psychologist at the Paris subsidiary of a German chemical company who is tasked with assessing the mental health of his CEO, Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale), and discovers that he may have links to the Holocaust.
Review by Alexander Pashby

Coming across as a greatest hits package of both recent animé and science fiction movies in general from the last 25 years, Vexille combines the clichés of Japanese manga and cartoons – soldiers in mecha suits, androids who debate the nature of humanity, evil conspiracies demonising the Japanese nation – with over-familiar imagery.
Review by Alex Fitch

Set against the backdrop of rural Arkansas, Shotgun Stories follows an escalating feud between two sets of half-brothers who differ in every way save for one side of their parental heritage.
Review by James Merchant

A soft and tender tale of queer love and loneliness in modern Taiwan, Zero Chou’s second feature Spider Lilies was screened as part of this year’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Review by Pamela Jahn

Director Juraj Herz had studied puppetry and theatre before coming to filmmaking and was a friend and collaborator of Jan Švankmajer. Not surprising then that a similar brand of Mitteleuropa murkiness and dark, jarring surrealism pervades what remains Herz’s most acclaimed work.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

The Party and the Guests is an engaging yarn about a small group of bourgeois people who set off for a picnic and soon find themselves in rather sadistic and perplexing company.
Review by Philip Winter

The sense of a vast and indifferent natural world is the keynote of the film. Throughout, human groups batter each other to smithereens, leaving isolated figures wandering, floundering in swamps, or crawling on all fours in the undergrowth of some of cinema’s most unnerving forestry.
Review by Stephen Thomson

While echoes of Anne Frank are present within the story, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is not a wartime thriller but a love story set in the midst of the fear and violence of occupation.
Review by CB