First time feature director Asger Leth takes an old cops and robbers cliche and, apart from some short lived moments of vertigo, does precisely nothing with it. The man in question is near mute poe faced ex cop and escaped criminal Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) who chooses the outside of the 20th floor of a building to make a media frenzied claim of innocence…

The Tenant, the last film in a loose trilogy dealing with urban loneliness at its most horrific, is far funnier and darker in atmosphere in many ways than both Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion…

Josh Trask, the director of Chronicle is only 26 years old. His $15m film, set between the endless gargle of “found footage films” and “super hero multiplex fodder” about a group of high schoolers who stumble upon a buried UFO and develop the power of telekinesis is played out wonderfully…

“…there’s an Austrian movie… it’s about a man killing a family just in order to go back to prison, where he felt better. It’s like a very dark, European version of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, but much more baroque in it’s filming.” This is Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone, Irreversable, Enter the Void) discussing the technical cinematic influence of one of his favourite films, Gerad Kargl’s horrifically effective and dazzlingly shot Angst…

Michael R. Roskam’s Bullhead is a strange film indeed. It’s part brooding character study, part crime drama and part tragedy set against the backdrop of the crooked, mafia run, drug enhancing, Belgian cattle trade…

Burton and Depp’s everlasting collaboration falls further into an out and out mess as their eighth film comes to a close. Dark Shadows is a reproduction of a horror series shown after school every day in the houses of suburban America. Screened in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a period of time in which the USA was in constant turmoil and the children and young adults of the day could escape into it’s gothic charm…

Fast rising Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo completely bypasses the sweeping Back to the Future’s of the cinematic world in this terrific low budget time travel flick. Conundrums which are over played in time travel films (going back to 1939 and killing Hitler for example) are eschewed for a miniature play on paradox involving only 4 characters and 3 locations and a 1 hour time travel window…

Wes Anderson’s latest is a glossy reissue package of everything that has come before it. Beautiful, Colourful, as immaculately composed as ever, dry, dark and sweetly funny, it certainly won’t win over Anderson’s detractors but for those of us who have wanted to live in one of his 7 films in one capacity or another or at least relive them over and over, the experience is only honed and deepened, making the fairy tale titled Moonrise Kingdom one of his best and definitely one of the best films of the year…

The majority of features and reviews written about Markus Schleinzer and his harrowing, masterfully crafted and deeply affecting debut film Michael have almost certainly all included a variation on this sentence: “Schleinzer has been working with Micheal Haneke for around 20 years as his casting director”

The Woman, which spurned walk outs, injuries and a very funny ranting youtube clip featuring one Captain Indignant when it debuted last year at Sundance, expands on the barrage of torture porn which we’ve all become accustomed to in one way or another and attempts to subvert a genre by unevenly using the genre itself…

Nuri Ceylan’s wonderful examination of the smaller aspects of life overtaking the drama of it all is a slow paced, dark and fascinating journey. At 158 minutes and falling under the banner of the causal film goer as “a movie where nothing happens” Once Upon a Time in Anatolia seems not to care in the slightest and, frankly, it’s all the better for it….

Gustavo Taretto’s utterly charming debut could well be the best romantic comedy without a hint of, what any mainstream audience would call, romance at all…

When a simple errand results in a sweet innocent and wordless back and forth between Lisa (Anna Paquin) and bus driver Marretti (Mark Ruffalo) and ends, ultimately, in tragedy, Lisa’s life turns into what she calls a moral gymnasium. A place she feels it necessary to exercise her compass and to become a stronger and better young woman. But to what end?

Christopher Nolan’s hulking finale to his benchmark trilogy of superhero films is a massively operatic, pitch black film which makes no excuses when going to the great lengths of making Batman “human after all”…

Robert Altman was hot property in 1972. M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Brewster McCloud all garnering critical if not commercial success. When Images screened at Cannes in 72 it went by relatively unnoticed by critics despite the fact that Susannah York won a best actress gong for it at the French Festival and has, like many of Altman’s output received little attention since…

Loosely photocopying scenes from Alien which helped build a blue print for modern horror Prometheus feels like history repeating instead of expanding and sadly, though beautifully designed and amply acted, it never quite reaches the heart pounding, sweaty palmed fear generated by Lt. Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo no matter how hard it tries…

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard take a sharpened axe of love to the face of their most treasured genre of film making. Playing wonderfully on the docile, expected and lazy set up of every slasher film made since Tobe Hooper changed the game in 1974, The Cabin in The Woods drips with blood and is shot through with the sniper smart wit of Whedon and the tight direction of Cloverfield’s Goddard…

Where as Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s admittedly great The Cabin in The Woods lovingly demolished the expectations of the humble slasher film with high concept style and budget, Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil seems as intent on doing the same with hillbillies, using only slapstick comedy and blood…

Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan makes his directorial debut alongside the terse, intense figure of David Morse, playing Robert Longfellow, a play write in self imposed exile at his mothers house in Los Angeles after a barrage of bad reviews in New York for his latest work…

Rupert Sanders’ grizzly adaptation of the Grimm Brothers fairy tale takes a twist on it’s original story and turns the titular Huntsman, who is, in the fairy tale, ordered to take Snow White into the Dark Forrest to die, into her saviour, pairing Mrs White with a burly terribly accented protector…