Michel Abdulaziz

Michael Shanks’s first feature is one wicked spitfire of a horror film, and if its metaphors seem heavy-handed, it has the decency at least to deliver them in the nastiest package possible.

There'll never be another Jurassic Park, the film too strong, too sharply drawn to recapture. So maybe we shouldn't try. Rebirth is in that register; beautifully shot, exciting, and understanding of the appeal of a silly diversion without much thought behind it.

Good cinematography can obscure bad writing, and I'm not really sold on what Materialists is selling about us. The film has charm and disarms in funny little interludes, yet it's disinterested in anything besides the aesthetic.

Tied Up Tight and Toxic, OH, HI! is a Heartstruck Misery for the Situationship Generation.

With Ride Or Die, Josalynn Smith transfuses grungy 90s dissatisfaction into the chassis of a beautifully shot modern feature, painted red, peeling to blue, then blossoming to a pale lilac.

Fiore Di Latte punctures wacky with doses of real, and Charlotte Ercoli uses the madness like an easel to paint a woefully accurate portrait of addiction.

Twinless is slightly sorta like Vertigo, on poppers, running on the energy of an off the walls 2000s movie laced with the spirit of a Hitchcockian thriller.

Esta Isla films in the dialect of Tropical Realism, austere and surreal, a bit verité: it makes no attempts at hiding because it holds itself plain to see.