Beastliness and clinical horror cohabit in Georges Franju’s wonderful Gothic fairy tale.
Review by Stephen Thomson

Nagisa Oshima’s 1960 The Sun’s Burial is a radically nihilistic portrayal of post-war Japanese youth.
Review by Sarah Cronin

While it might be considered less important or engaging than Nagisa Oshima’s later work, Night and Fog in Japan is a fascinating reflection on the dynamics of political movements in 1950s Japan.
Review by Martin Cleary

Bertrand Tavernier’s transposition of Jim Thompson’s disillusioned chronicle of Southern corruption to the moral quagmire of colonial Africa was an inspired choice.
Review by Paul Huckerby

In April, the Polish film festival Kinoteka paid tribute to the recently deceased Polish master Jerzy Kawalerowicz, screening three of his films, including the acclaimed Mother Joan of Angels, a feverish exploration of sexual repression and religious fanaticism.
Review by Stephen Thomson

The ground-breaking animé series Paranoia Agent first aired on Japanese TV in the spring of 2004 and has recently been re-released in a beautifully packaged thin box-set. Written and directed by Satoshi Kon, the man behind Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent focuses on a seemingly random set of attacks by a mysterious skater armed with a golden baseball bat.
Review by Alex Fitch and Virginie Sélavy

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