Šarlota (Natália Germáni) returns to the mountain village where she grew up to find she’s an object of suspicion to the villagers. The gradual influx of horror elements and the dreamy expressionistic cinematography of the lush European forest are similar to David Bruckner’s THE RITUAL but where that film dealt with manhood and toxic masculinity, NIGHTSIREN centres on womanhood and explores social sexual norms in Eastern Europe. Is Šarlota a witch or an urban, educated, sexually-liberated woman? Proving that folk horror isn’t an exclusively English subgenre, NIGHTSIREN uses folk traditions and symbolism in service of its exploration of the societal misogyny buried just beneath the surface of everyday life.

A charming celebration of the amateur. Jim Desforges (Nicolas Giraud) is an aeronautical engineer who dreams of launching the first amateur manned space flight. Like BRIAN AND CHARLES or A BUNCH OF AMATEURS, there’s a charm in seeing the film’s amateur rocket scientists building a rocket out of scraps in a farmhouse. There’s an accompanying sense of power and liberation too: why should space travel be the province solely of nation states or major corporations? Why couldn’t we open source space travel and open up the Earth’s gravitational prison for anyone and everyone with the will to escape it? A gentle film with a climax that makes the journey worthwhile.

High school is a shared nightmare. A unique subculture that most of us experienced but which we’ve forgotten the intensity of. Ethan Eng’s debut feature captures the anarchic chaos of the high school experience with a dizzying montage of styles, tones, and genres while also representing the deep emotional lows of separating from friends and the feeling that, after high school, life as you know it will be over. Astonishingly inventive Gen Z filmmaking proving the next generation will be better than mine.

If you’d asked me ten years ago which viral short film do you least expect to get a feature-length adaptation, I would have said SALAD FINGERS (2004) followed by MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (2010). The eventual feature film turns out to be a marvel of technically complex stop-motion animation which also captures something poignant about loss, trauma, dementia, and ageing. There’s a surprising amount of the writers in the film: the line about discovering that an audience is not the same thing as a community feels profoundly true.

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD is to thirty-somethings what OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN is to forty-somethings: a mature emotionally resonant romantic comedy-drama that embraces the complexity of modern relationships. Since I’m closer to forty than thirty, I was more affected by this film about a childless adult navigating relationships with other people’s children while conflicted about their own potential for parenthood than the former. It’s honestly refreshing to see a romantic comedy that straightforwardly deals with adulthood, sexuality, and parenthood with far more emotional maturity than any Hollywood romcom. Get the ‘unnecessary sex scene’ discourse people to watch this and have their heads explode.

A cosmic event strikes the lake where two brothers are swimming, mutilating one and dooming his chances of taking part in Europe’s first space colonisation mission. TROPIC is an intriguing blend of genres that talks about humanity and what it means to accept or abandon what cannot be changed. The film has a slow weirdness that evokes Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA and alludes to John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror of the ‘80s. TROPIC presents an interesting metaphor for what space colonisation would mean for the planet but could benefit from tighter editing to resolve some structural issues and a little more time spent on ancillary plotlines to build them up.

There’s a huge generational divide between baby boomers who are rich in capital but emotionally immature and millennials who are poor but emotionally fortified by multiple recessions and 21st century uncertainty. ADOPTING AUDREY examines the gap between the generations and mines what shared emotions can be found there. Jena Malone is terrific as a socially atomised millennial striving for community and a sense of what home might be while Robert Hunger-Bühler is very funny as a cold Herzogian boomer parent who can’t connect with his children despite his growing regrets in life.

An ancient horror buried deep beneath the clay of England waiting to unleash unimaginable evils from knowledges hidden for millennia in folk tales and superstitious legends. A palette of greys and browns that makes the splashes of colour representing objects and beings from beyond the boundary limits of human imagination all the more shocking. Political and military authorities mentally incapable of comprehending information that damages their ultimately fragile worldviews. A population of ordinary people filled with ancestral race memories of the supposedly genetically superior ritualistically slaughtering their inferiors. So, quintessentially British.

When Kiefer Sutherland’s character says to Amy Smart’s character “Hey cis”, the film is unlocked as a trans allegory. Sutherland plays a trans man evidenced by his continual taking of pills and his recent alienation from former friends who seemingly can’t accept who he is. His obsession with mirrors is a reflection (!) of his anxiety about his appearance post-transition. Ultimately Sutherland accepts himself by metaphorically killing the oppressive Catholic Church and literally fighting the demon in the mirror. He realises that it is not himself but the world that needs to change: the whole world appears backwards to him at the end.

A cautionary tale about moving to a community that you know nothing about, buying someone’s foreclosed home, stealing or selling all the stuff that they left, using their personal effects and family photos to start making a documentary film about them without their consent, and recording their vulnerable father in a convalescent home without his permission. Absurdly bad pacing that becomes clearest in the final act when you see how much exposition they suddenly need to do around elements that should have been introduced in the first act. For example, the Devil’s Throat, a pit in the woods (that apparently has its own sign?) that comes out of nowhere to be highly significant. Nice to see Juliette Lewis.