Let The Right One In

This Swedish, pre-teen vampire movie takes a well-worn genre and infuses it with an art house auteur-filmmaker’s visual flair, exquisite composition and attention to detail. Bloody, darkly funny and utterly gorgeous to look at, this is a poignant story of the friendship between two weird kids who can’t fit in with their contemporaries – he because he’s a nerd and the favourite target for the local bullies; she because she needs to feast upon human blood.

The Kreutzer Sonata

Director Bernard Rose caused a storm in Hollywood with Ivansxtc, a loose Tolstoy adaptation set in LA’s dissolute, treacherous film industry. The Kreutzer Sonata is the second part of a planned trilogy. Like Ivansxtc, it’s based on Tolstoy and it stars Danny Huston, this time as a wealthy philanthropist whose jealous obsession with his beautiful musician wife seeds cancerous doubts about her fidelity in his imagination. It’s a raw, aggressively sexual account of passion and possession, which takes as its central motif the eponymous Beethoven sonata which Rose describes as being a piece of music clearly about sex.

Mancora

There’s something about the road trip in Latin American cinema which invites a) increasingly complicated sexual misadventures and b) disaster. The devastatingly attractive protagonists of the Spanish/Peruvian co-production Mancora engage enthusiastically in the former while blundering blindly towards the latter. It’s a hell of a ride – uninhibited, hedonistic, abandoned and desperately sexy. This level of drug-addled bad-behaviour can only end in tears – or in bed.

Sleep Furiously

A beguiling, meditative study of the rhythms of rural life in a farming community in Wales, this documentary feature debut by Gideon Koppel announces an impressive talent. Koppel’s approach to factual filmmaking is poetic and playful. In the village, the one room schoolhouse faces closure; the mobile library struggles with the introduction of modern technology and one man and his over-excited dog have a disaster at the sheepdog trial. Victoria sponge cakes are assembled reverently, and everything from chutney to parsnips are entered into the village show. A warm, affectionate and hopeful film.

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