Enjoyable as a sweet throw-back to quirky indie comedies of the ‘00s: a little NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and a dash of Kevin Smith. Honestly it would work better if I hadn’t seen it at the same festival as THERAPY DOGS because the two bear immediate comparison and I LIKE MOVIES comes out worse: both involve aspiring filmmakers in a Canadian high school who are putting together a year-end video and who have an emotional conflict with their one friend and filmmaking partner. I LIKE MOVIES is the parallel universe THERAPY DOGS where it was made as a traditional filmic interpretation.

SANCTUARY’s thoughtful depiction of fetish uses the sense of mystery behind sub-dom to bring the audience into the characters’ tangled power dynamics. You’re made part of the role-play because you, like the characters, don’t know what is real and what is erotic play. This wouldn’t work if the film didn’t also make you want Margaret Qualley to step on you. Her expressive face conveys what is otherwise left unsaid while also hiding secrets behind the role-play. The power of her role is in making you fall in love with her while basically learning nothing about her.

A mix of THE WICKER MAN and GROUNDHOG DAY that is an interesting blend of genres but adds up to less than the sum of its parts. A community of women refugees living on a small island are treated as non-citizens by the wider world; they are ghosts in the land of the living. Their fragile existence is disrupted when male violence encroaches on their island. STONE TURTLE has a beautifully animated and heartbreaking eye-of-the-duck scene that evokes THE RED TURTLE and holds the key to unlocking the whole film.

An English woman struggles to find the M8 and gradually learns to see Scottish people as human beings.

The best representations of the alien and unknown use abstract visual poetry to represent the alien as not only unknown and unknowable but literally inconceivable to us within the bounds that we think in. UNDER THE SKIN excels at this from the opening moments immersing us in eerie conceptual imagery and Mica Levi’s otherworldly but menacing score. I’d never noticed before but there’s slightly disjointed editing in her early interactions with the random Glaswegian men she picks up and it really contributes to the unmoored feeling of that first half.

When I hear motorists and politicians complain about Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil blocking roads, I think they ought to be thankful that the activists are engaging in such milquetoast actions. In a just world, their SUVs would be destroyed, fossil fuel extraction and refinement facilities would be expropriated and dismantled, and private planes would be permanently grounded. As Andreas Malm argues in the book that inspires this film, property destruction and sabotage are more than justified at this stage in the climate crisis. A few well-placed drone attacks on the private planes of the most obscenely wealthy and destructive could do wonders.

THE ORDINARIES’ main character, Paula Feinmann (Fine Sendel), is a Supporting Character. Her father was a Main Character and she studies at the Main Character School to learn how to emote and how to draw the narrative’s attention to herself. It’s a meta conceit that pushes against the limits of cinematic structure in a way similar to Spike Jonze’s ADAPTATION or Charlie Kaufman’s SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK. Like Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable, the entire film is a metacommentary where the tension comes from the threat of the narrative collapsing under its own postmodern convolutions. THE ORDINARIES is successful inasmuch as it doesn’t collapse and says something about class and emotional expression even if the pacing falls off towards the end.

An England seen through the prism of mental illness might be the truest view of England. TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING takes the audience on a psychogeographic journey along the length of England through the eyes of Audrey Amiss (Monica Dolan), a mentally ill British artist whose work was only recognised after her death in 2013. Audrey describes herself as “avant-garde and misunderstood”, a perpetual victim let down by society and those around her. Like TÁR, the world of the film is a reflection of the protagonist’s mental state and we see an England without stability, an England replete with abandoned hospitals and Viking battles and Morris dancers in the street and low-simmering resentments against perceived enemies.

A documentary about the theme of failure that abdicates its responsibility to discuss the actual human costs of failure. Stephen Skrynka is a visual artist obsessed with the Wall of Death, a fairground stunt attraction inside which a motorcyclist drives around the walls of a wooden cylinder. Though the documentary focuses on superficial surface level failures—Stephen falling off motorcycles and injuring himself—it fails to adequately explore the emotional and financial costs of the larger failures to the people he’s enlisted to help him achieve his dreams.

Trapped in the intersection of mental health issues, trauma-induced anxiety, and contemporary Scottish racism, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena) seeks to insulate her and her daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) against the world outside their high-rise flat. Ama seeks a world beyond her mother. A tough watch partly because Lukumuena’s striking performance was triggeringly accurate for me in her depiction of panic attacks. A beautiful film that shows an unbeautiful world: the lighting of Black skin was particularly impressive and effective in letting the actors express themselves through subtle gestures.

This year’s EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: a joyous and hilarious blend of genres that uses irony and maximalist extravagance to speak sincerely about specific lived experience but in a universal way. POLITE SOCIETY is a modern Jane Austen story that combines wuxia films like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON with comic-book style films like SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD all in service of a story that speaks to how modern British-Pakistani women approach practices like arranged marriage and how the generational trauma of second-generation immigrants continues to filter down to their children. Outstanding supporting turns from Ella Bruccoleri, Seraphina Beh, and Nimra Bucha.