Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013)
★★★☆☆
Filmed in the woods around New Jersey, Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces is a mesmerising and atmospheric evocation of childhood.
★★★☆☆
Dark and uncompromisingly grim, David Gordon Green’s Joe is a wicked Southern Gothic tale of violence and vice in the heart of the Deep South.
★★★★★
Richard Linklater’s intimate portrayal of growing up is an intoxicating combination of humour, melancholy and unbridled hope that will mean something to everyone.
★★★★☆
A rich, pulpy, synth-infused southern thriller, Jim Mickle’s Cold In July is a brutish neo-noir homage to the cult classics of old.
★★★☆☆
With a magical use of 3D, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s TS Spivet sees a gifted 10-year-old trek across America to receive an award for his invention, given to him in the belief he is an adult.
★★★★☆
The powerfully dramatised true story that recreates the last day of a 22-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, shot by railway police in the San Francisco Bay area on New Year’s Day 2009.
★★★☆☆
Fast-moving, gruesome, twisted, about-to-be cult thriller that underneath the horror may pack a violent satirical punch. If ever a film did what it says on the tin, it’s this.
★★☆☆☆
A Jewish caper in New York, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo finds its gentle comedy in a star-studded Manhattan romance.
★★★★☆
Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces Of January is a stylish adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith thriller as a married couple and a stranger get drawn deeper into a dangerous relationship of mutual dependence.
★★★☆☆
A big hit at Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival in the US and previewed at Sundance London, this suspenseful, original and darkly comic revenge thriller set in America’s South is hugely enjoyable.
★★★★☆
With a cast list as long as your livery-sleeved arm, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is a colourful romp through the bright lights of Old Europe.
★★★★☆
A stylish Jim Jarmusch movie, Only Lovers Left Alive is a contemporary tale of centuries-old world-weary vampires, their lives sustained by love and blood.
★★★★☆
In a near future dominated by computers, Spike Jonze’s Her sees a lonely man fall in love with his operating system, which understands him better than he does himself.
★★★☆☆
Through comeback, doping and scandal, Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lie charts the Tour de France winner’s rise to the podium and the lies that kept him there.