In this stupefying, gut-wrenching South Korean drama, gangsters are only marginally more violent than wife-beaters and equally as contemptible.
Review by Tina Park

Violence is yet again the main subject of Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.
Review by Pamela Jahn

Katalin Varga, directed by British writer-director Peter Strickland, offers a dark fable unfolding in the rural wilds of the Romanian hinterland.
Review by Pamela Jahn

A dark, surreal semi-biopic about the ‘Dancin’ Outlaw’ Jesco White, White Lightnin’ follows Jesco from his early childhood in West Virginia, mostly spent sniffing gasoline and lighter fluid, to an increasingly criminal and violent adolescence.
Review by Pamela Jahn

í–zgí¼r Yildirim’s gritty gangster drama, Chiko, is set in the immigrant neighbourhood of Hamburg’s rough Dulsberg district, its compelling hero portrayed with bristling intensity by Denis Moschitto.
Review by Pamela Jahn

In a manner reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ole Bornedal’s riveting thriller Just Another Love Story (2007) opens with the death of its narrator, who detachedly comments on his dramatic demise as it occurs on-screen.
Review by Pamela Jahn

Set in Pinochet’s Chile in the late 1970s, the film takes its title from John Travolta’s main character in Saturday Night Fever, with whom the middle-aged, tight-lipped and highly damaged protagonist Raíºl is fatally obsessed.
Review by Pamela Jahn