Tykho Moon (1996)
May 14, 2025Lunar Colony Noir
Film from Enki Bilal, a celebrated comic-book creator in France, about the noirish goings-on and in-politics on a lunar colony
Eurimages
The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story (2003)
Jul 29, 2004Surreal Mock Biography
The first part in Peter Greenaway's three-part mock biography, a surreal, sprawling work of mad information overload and obsessive lists
Next Door (2005)
Sep 21, 2014Strange Apartment Neighbours/Reality Blurring
Brilliantly twisted Norwegian film in the vein of Roman Polanski's Repulsion and The Tenant about a man whose dealings with two girls living in the apartment next door starts blurring and shifting into some genuinely surreal and out there, not to mention perverse, territory
Enter the Void (2009)
Dec 13, 2010Soul's Journey Into the Afterlife
Gaspar Noe's hallucinatory Day-Glo vision of a soul's departure into the afterlife all shot in first-person perspective. This could be a 2001: A Space Odyssey for the trance culture generation
The Secret of Kells (2009)
Mar 23, 2015Animation/Celtic History and Mythology
Beautifully made animated film that won surprise recognition at the Academy Awards. More a festival film than necessarily a box-office one
Babycall (2011)
Aug 19, 2024Reality Blurring/Haunted Baby Monitor
Pål Sletaune is a Norwegian director who deserves more attention for his reality-bending surrealism. Here mother Noomi Rapace moves into new apartment where ghostly screams come through the baby monitor and she soon finds that she cannot be sure what is real
The Monk (2011)
Apr 15, 2014Monk's Temptation by the Devil
The Monk is a sordid classic of 18th Century Gothic literature, filled with crazed lusts and Catholic guilt and damnation. However, in the hands of French director Dominik Moll, all the tortured sexuality has been watered down and the story stuffed as a costume drama
The Suicide Shop (2012)
Mar 10, 2013Animation/Black Comedy
French animated film that is about as far from children's entertainment as it is possible to get – a mordantly dark comedy that operates in similar territory to The Addams Family in its tale of a family that operates a shop selling items of despatch to the suicidally minded
The Last Days (2013)
Jul 11, 2014Worldwide Plague of Agoraphobia
A fascinating Spanish film about a worldwide apocalypse created by a plague that makes the entire population mortally afraid of going out of doors
Song of the Sea (2014)
Mar 28, 2015Animation/Selkies and Celtic Mythology
An Oscar nominees for Best Animated Film – a unique and exquisitely drawn dive into Celtic mythology that comes with wit, humour and the emotional tenderness of a Hayao Miyazaki. This deserves to be seen far more widely than it ended up being
The Brand New Testament (2015)
Aug 21, 2016God Living in the Modern World/Black Comedy
A wickedly irreverent and even occasionally blasphemous comedy in which God is a scruffy, bad-tempered man living in Brussels who spends all his time devising ways to make humans miserable
Thelma (2017)
Dec 28, 2018Psychic Powers
Essentially a Norwegian version of Carrie. The ingenious spin it places on the Carrie story is to tell it as an LGBT story and have the psychically empowered heroine not bullied and tormented but struggling against a lesbian attraction to another girl.
Muse (2017)
May 18, 2018Man Haunted by Supernatural Muses
Jaume Balaguero has become one of the most promising of modern Spanish genre directors, principally on the basis of the [Rec] films. However, this supernatural mystery that resembles one of Dario Argento's Three Mothers films fails to quite come together
Dilili in Paris (2018)
May 24, 2021Animation/Journey Through Belle Epoque Paris
Michel Ocelot is one of the great underrated animators of the world. Here he makes an exquisite tribute to the Belle Epoque featuring appearances from names of the era and decked out in Steampunk inventions
Vivarium (2019)
Apr 13, 2020Couple Trapped in a Strange Suburb
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can't leave. Then things start to get really strange.
Annette (2021)
Sep 11, 2021Surrealist Musical
As a follow-up to Holy Motors, Leos Carax returns with of all things a musical. As might be expected of Carax, this is a wildly surrealistic film, not the least of which is one of the characters is a singing puppet
The Grandmother (2021)
May 14, 2022Sinister Grandmother
Paco Plaza, best known for the [Rec] movies, returns with an unsettlingly effective film about a girl forced to tend her grandmother only to find increasingly sinister things going on
Infinity Pool (2023)
Feb 25, 2023Executed Clones/Bored Lawless Elites
Extraordinary Brandon Cronenberg film about a fictional country where those convicted of crimes can have clone copies executed in their place, leading to an tourist underworld where all crimes are permissible
We Are Zombies (2023)
May 11, 2026Zombie Comedy
A zombie comedy from the Quebecois trio who were responsible for Turbo Kid, this takes place in a world where zombies are less a horde than an annoyance who have been relegated to the fringes of society
Flow (2024)
Dec 28, 2024Animation/Animals on a Journey
A delightful animated film from Latvia made entirely without dialogue, following a group of animals fleeing as their territory is flooded. The winner for my top film of 2024.
The Shrouds (2024)
Jun 21, 2025Grave Camera Technology
At age 81, David Cronenberg is still on great form with this perversely fascinating work about the development of a technology that places cameras inside graves to observe corpses as they decay