Lilting

“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love.

Welcome to New York

Depardieu as an imaginary version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was always likely to be a study in grossness. Add director and co-writer Abel Ferrara, the hardcore extremist behind Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, and a white-knuckle night out is guaranteed. Depardieu’s powerful French banker Devereaux is a creature of grotesque and relentless appetites, alright, a bloated sex addict and rapist.

A Promise

The long march of history pales next to the clamped-down passions and pulpy theatrics of A Promise, the first English-language film from that often most sinuous and witty of French directors, Patrice Leconte. Wit, alas, is nowhere to be seen on this occasion, which may just mark the worst foray into non-native celluloid territory since The Lives of Others' Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gave us The Tourist four years ago.

Mood Indigo

The magically off-kilter Mood Indigo is based on Boris Vian's posthumously celebrated Surrealist novel L'écume des jours (1947), one translated title of which is "Froth on the Daydream" and another "Foam on the Daze". Literally, it means "The foam of the days" or, more ominously, "The scum of the days". As it transpires, director Michel Gondry gradually skims away the froth from the movie's surface to find a layer of poisonous scum underneath.

Who Is Dayani Cristal?

The struggle of the migrant journey from Mexico and Central America to el Norte has been much in the news recently, and, coincidentally, it’s a theme that cinema has been following too. After Diego Quemada-Diez's recent The Golden Dream, about teenagers who set out on that difficult route, Marc Silver’s drama-documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows us a similar experience, though through a somewhat different lens.

Hercules

A Grecian palace on a studio lot. Gods wander about among the plywood and polystyrene looking deific. As a child is raised to the heavens a voice(over) is heard to intone the following legend.

Oracle: You don’t want to believe those myths you’ve read in boys’ own books about the heroes of ancient times. That Roger Lancelyn Green is so tediously on-message. Take the dozen labours of the demi-god Hercules…