Martyn Conterio

★★★☆☆ Set approximately 45,000 years ago, when our ancestors Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, British director Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller Out of Darkness (formerly The Origin) depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.

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★★★★☆ With Lynch/Oz, renowned film studies documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe turns his attention to the celebrated, surrealist oeuvre of David Lynch: in particular, the director’s recurring fascination (arguably, obsession) with 1939’s MGM classic The Wizard of Oz.

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★★★☆☆ Maria Schrader’s She Said goes behind the scenes of how The New York Times journalists led the charge in bringing down Harvey Weinstein. One of the most successful film producers of all time, he was also a sexual predator who used his wealth, privilege and power to destroy the lives of countless women.

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★★★★★ Bones and All is a savage, swooning 1980s-set tale of first love and finding one’s place in the world. Observational but mysterious, also political and anti-nostalgic, Luca Guadagnino’s road trip to the States finds equal amounts of horror and beauty at every turn.

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★★★★☆ Bros, a ground-breaking new romantic comedy, is the first Hollywood studio-backed picture to feature gay leads playing gay characters, with the supporting cast coming almost entirely from the LGBTQ community. It’s an important moment for representation on screen and surprisingly political in nature.

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★★★★☆ You Won’t Be Alone is the fiercely poet debut of Macedonian-Australian Goran Stolevski. Set in the land of his birth, North Macedonia, at some point in the 19th century, the film follows the unusual and sometimes fraught life of a shape-shifting witch played by various actors over the years.

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★★★★☆ Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams caps off an astonishing set of history-focused essay films, beginning with Nostalgia for the Light and continuing with The Pearl Button. The trilogy represents one of the great artistic statements of the decade.

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★★★★☆ Written by first-time screenwriters Darren and Jeff Allen Geare, The Retaliators is a rock ‘n’ roll ride into the freaky side of vengeance. Bridget Smith and Samuel Gonzalez Jr’s bloody thriller transgressively argues for violence as a rejuvenating force, a great problem-solver, and eye-for-an-eye revenge being a righteous act.

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★★★★☆ After the large-scale brutality of political horror film New Order, Mexican provocateur Michel Franco returns with a low-key study in deceptive behaviour and enigmatic motives. Tim Roth headlines as a man attempting to escape his past and present, while on holiday with loved ones at a resort in Acapulco.

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★★★☆☆ The Sadness is a nasty and thoroughly unpleasant survival horror film set in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, directed by Canadian first-timer Rob Jabbaz. Warning: this movie is not for the faint-hearted and requires a strong tolerance for depictions of brutality and sexual violence on screen.

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