FOUR AND A HALF STARS Generations of family history and emotion play out on a remote German farm. It's a history no one can escape. PERIOD DRAMA GERMANY German #THESOUNDOFFALLING Starring Hanna Heckt, Susanne Wuest Mascha Schilinski’s THE SOUND OF FALLING is a staggering piece of filmmaking - dense, demanding and emotionally bruising in ways that stay with you long after the credits roll. It is not a film interested in accessibility and will make you work for its pleasures.

FOUR AND A HALF STARS The world suddenly and fundamentally shifts for a young boy - a member of The Hitler Youth - when the Third Reich falls. PERIOD DRAMA GERMANY German #AMRUM Starring Jasper Billerbeck, Diane Kruger In his quietly extraordinary AMRUM, Fatih Akin (HEAD ON) trades the urban intensity that has long defined his work for something softer, sadder and infinitely more reflective. This is perhaps the least recognisably “Fatih Akin” film he has made - stripped of t

FOUR STARS The first chapters of Les Misérables but there's no singing when a man imprisoned for kindness finds purpose when finally released from gaol. PERIOD DRAMA FRANCE French #JEANVALJEAN Starring Grégory Gadebois, Bernard Campan If LES MISÉRABLES is the grand, table-groaning banquet of French literature, then JEAN VALJEAN is the entree; thoughtfully plated and undeniably tasteful. Director Éric Besnard zeroes in on the opening stretch of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, st

FOUR AND A HALF STARS A young man in colonial Algeria is a stranger to everyone who knows him. DRAMA FRANCE French #THESTRANGER Starring Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder With THE STRANGER, director Francois Ozon doesn’t simply revisit Albert Camus’s famously cool slab of existentialism, he turns into something pared back, distilled, faintly accusatory. The result is a film of icy assurance and unnerving beauty, one that feels philosophically aligned. The broad strokes will be

FOUR STARS A young girl calls from a car, trapped in Gaza. She's surrounded by dead bodies, gunfire can be heard in the background. The Red Crescent is working to save her. DRAMA TUNISIA Arabic #HINDRAJAB Starring Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees There’s a moment, early on in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB where you realise the film has no intention of letting you look away. Not through spectacle, not through manipulation, but through something far more confronting: restraint. What unfol

FOUR STARS In the crowd at a desert rave, a father is looking for his missing daughter. DRAMA SPAIN Spanish #SIRAT Starring Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona In some rock strewn corner of a Moroccan desert, a rave is taking place. A father hauls his young son through the crowd, chasing rumours of a missing daughter he hopes to find. When rumours that a war has started in the ‘real world’, he falls in with a ragged convoy as they drift from one dust-blown gathering to the next.