Let The Right One In - There is a lot of festival buzz and hype surrounding this low-key Swedish vampire love-story in no small part because the film deserves it and its big Best Narrative Feature win at Tribeca. The big hype may play a part in squashing this delicate, subtle and patient film, which has is executed with the tone of Guillermo del Toro's Cronos yet mines similar 'immortality sadness' themes as Tony Scott's (obviously much more bombastic) The Hunger. It is also a fabulous mix of coming of age sweetness with distant emotional storytelling (so often found in Scandinavian cinema). The film has visual smarts (it shows the story as opposed to 'telling it') to burn but keeps things always grounded in the story of 12 year old Oskar and his young initiation into love and violence. Let The Right one in insists on keeping the audience on its toes with quiet unpredictability.

Who's That Knocking At My Door? – It is impossible to talk about this Korean revenge drama without the mind wandering back to Chan-Wook Park's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. In fact Knocking runs the risk of being simply a knock-off in the way Tarantino's Pulp Fiction inspired a similar slew of lesser imitators. However, a healthy injection of naturalism, along the lines of Hong Sang-Soo's human-relationships-under-the-microscope films. The tale focuses on the debilitating psychological effects of bullying, but morphs into a relationship drama before finally setting on a 'caper-gone-horribly wrong.' Like many of the best films to come out of South Korea, it is deft at switching tone on a dime. Why the creators chose the straw-dogs motif for the poster, or the english language title being the same as Martin Scorscese's debut film is beyond me, although debut director Yang Hea-Hoon is certainly one to watch.

Batman: Gotham Knight – After taking in the sumptuous collection of animated Dark Knight shorts it is considerable just how much the Burton and post-Burton incarnations owe to great musical scores. The music here sets the stage for several cutting edge Japanese animation houses (not the lest of which being Twitch favourite Studio 4C), to paint Gotham and its inhabitants in an expressionistic light. While the stores of the 6 shorts are somewhat on the superficial side and nothing terribly new, but the 'scribble in the margins' nature of Gotham Knight makes it interesting. It's not burdened with a driving narrative thrust, so it can play in different corners of the mythology. Examples such as a weapons field test, or Batman dealing with a gun shot wound (in a Whedon/Abrams-esque narrative), or skaters offering 'Rashomon-style' testimonials are all rewarding enough an experience as in the same way as The Animatrix. A sharp-shooter segment opens with an assassination in Europe, which is drawn with such exquisite attention to detail and architecture that you almost want Batman to move to the Old World and set up shop. A pity that this one is not getting a wide theatrical release, because everyones favourite vigilante of the shadows has never looked better (I like the baroque in my Batman that Nolan and company have bled out in the futile quest for elusive 'realism'). If anyone plans to pick up the DVD of this tomorrow (and you probably should), find the biggest screen with the past possible sound to take this in.

Time Crimes – A lot of words have been written on Nacho Vigalondo's debut feature, for which our own overlord Todd "Zod" Brown is an executive producer. It is a nearly impossible film to talk about without spoiling the fun. Suffice it to say that I cannot remember the last time I saw a film that interacts with its audience in such a novel way. It makes you feel smart while watching it because it rewards those paying attention and hand-holds those that are not in the most subtle of ways. In the full house screening it was quite joyful to hear the different grunts and giggles as folks started to comprehend the gears in this particular swiss watch. Timecrimes may not have anything really to say, it actually offers a pretty vicious brand of nihilism which would probably make Michael Haneke crack a grin, but it plays to its strength of solid, solid plotting. It is a puzzle-box film in the best sense of the term and it can play quite confidently in the same sandbox with Memento, Run Lola Run, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, and Primer.

The Baby's Room – Why oh why is Álex de la Iglesia (Accion Mutante, Ferpect Crime) so willfully ignored on this side of the ocean? His 77 minute entry into Spains anthology show Peliculas Para no Dormir (Tales to Keep You Awake) is richly cinematic and offers 10 times the depth of most ghost stories. It is the tale of one man's parental anxiety at the safety of his infant and family and the slow-death by the 'culture-of-fear' laden emphasis on total security. The film makes stellar use both visually and subtextually of an infra-red video baby monitor. Like how the night-vision makes the eyes look creepy? How about that on an infant. This may be the most visually restrained de la Iglesia film, but the man is growing in other departments. Equal in class and handsome production design to Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (and predating that film by airing on Spanish TV in 2006), but elements of de la Iglesia's trademark humour permeate the proceedings without ever trifling the story or dumbing down the picture. It is more than a tad tragic (nay it is outrageous) that The Baby's Room is not gracing North American Screens and that the upcoming Peliculas Para no Dormir DVD box-set will likely barely be noticed. You've been warned: Take Notice.

To Let – The other film on the Peliculas Para no Dormir double-bill is reminiscent of audience favourite [Rec]. This is not the least surprising, as one of that films directors, Jaume Balagueró is in charge. A straight up gothic-gory nail-biter that trims the story to the bone in favour of moving the actors through the action and karo syrup. Nearly the entire run-time is confined to a single apartment building, and much like [Rec], there is a craftsmans attention to displaying geography and elements in the frame to put the audience right there. Also like [Rec] and unlike The Baby's Room, the characters are paper thin. To Let is inclined to be being a thrill ride first and everything else second. It is pretty darn good at what it does, while offering no reason whatsoever to come back to it.

Pye-Dog – The magical surprise at this years Fantasia festival. The story concerns two orphans. Dui is in his early twenties and working as a driver for the Triads, Wang is twelve and living with his grandmother after his father abandoned him and his mother suicided (in that order). Wang has not spoken a single word since his father left and upon meeting Dui sees a potential father figure role model. The two take to each other immediately, and bring in substitute teacher Miss Cheung into their private community when Wangs school requires a stage for a Christmas Pageant. Dui is 'under cover' at the school, posing as the janitor, at the request of his boss/mentor (the always great Eric Tsang) with the goal to suss out the son of a rival Triad Boss who has fled from Hong Kong. If you can see where this is going, then you are missing the point Dui, Wang and Miss Cheung spend oodles of time building this magnificent Gondry-esque stage out of the detritus cast-away objects to last but for their moment. The story is great, but secondary to what is going on with the film. Wispy romantic notions a writ large in beautiful visual gestures that echo the noir stylings of Wong Kar Wai, but end with the geographical precision of Johnnie To. All of this is wrapped in a shell of gauzy melodrama (There is a P.T. Anderson inspired sing-along to “Light Up My Life” that is free of irony or even notions of copy-cat). Pye-Dog, like its central (literal) set-piece may be assembled out of spare parts, but it absolutely becomes art.

Punch Lady – The less said about the hack-job that is Punch Lady, the better. The film, a lady boxing picture than is not a fraction as worthy as Karyn Kusama's similarly named Girlfight, is so incredibly frustrating because every single time it threatens to become interesting, it falls back of broad sitcom humour and cliché, cliché, cliché. South Korean cinema is often praised for the ability of its filmmakers to fuse several genres and tones so delicately together, well there is a flip-side, a dark-side to the success of The Host and Save the Green Planet and its name is Punch Lady. It is perhaps the best example to underscore the funk that South Korea currently finds itself.

Hydro-Lévesques – It is oh so sweet to see that Guy Maddin has a disciple. The stand-out short at Fantasia this year features a Sign-Language video-translator for separatist René Lévesque who is also a nun and somewhat of a superhero. She must save her beloved Quebec by destroying Winnipeg. Those familiar with Maddin's shorts will see that first-time director Mathieu Rankin has a bit of a way to go to catch up with his inspiration, but it is a fun, fun phantasmagorical trip with its own sense of Canadian humour.

[Rec] – A film for which the Sitges Festival YouTube clip of the audience reaction is really the only review for. While all the parts are familiar and the characters is so thin as to be translucent, the action and visceral craftsmanship make this one of the ultimate modern horror-thrill rides. You've heard lots about this film already, I've got nothing to add except that the bigger the audience with this one, the better. A real shame that Sony is burying this for their remake, Quarantine. This is a lighting strike that needs no improvement. It is what it is, and makes no bones about it.

The Substitute - I intentionally forestalled reviewing Ole Bornedal's fantasy adolescent film when I caught it at TIFF in 2007 because I had convinced myself that somewhere in the last half hour there was a reel missing from the print. That a film can go from a giddy mean-spiritedness (see also Thomas Anders Jensen's Adam's Apples) with a brain, a heart and a pulse to an inept and clumsy mess (and this in an instant I can point out down to the exact frame!) is kind of baffling. Yes it is fun to watch Paprika Steen chew the scenery like a starving woman at an all chocolate buffet, and yes it is fun to watch Ulrich Thomsen play the earnest and clueless dad (both opposite to their Adam's Apples characters) in a Men In Black inspired after-school special. The central concept of the film is that the students in a grade 6 class think their oddball substitute teacher is a space alien which is mined for generation gap communication follies until it gets tied down in poorly executed plotting details. Unless there is only a single subtitled print touring the world and nobody has noticed it is missing said reel, then one has to wonder what went wrong in the editing room.

Before The Fall – Many directors would kill to have their films shot with the sophistication and quality of this pre-apocalyptic intimate little film. It is curious that such a small down-beat story would have this kind of visual poetry. (Well, I guess that isn't fair, because Nuri-Bilge Ceylan has been doing this for a number of years as well). When a world-wide broadcast airs telling everyone, including the rural backwater in Spain where the film takes place, that a 20 mile diameter meteor is en route to earth pretty much insuring the fatality of everything. 20-something Ale and flees the chaos that erupts in town of Laguna, with his mom in tow, to relieve the babysitter of his brother, Thomas's kids. Thomas will likely not be returning on a train (the arrival time being after the 3 days everyone has to live) to see his kids, but the serial killer who Tomas put behind bars a number of years ago, likely will. Or at least Mom seems to think so after seeing TV broadcasts of the the prison being abandoned by its guards when the world was given an expiry date. The catch is that Ale and Mom discover that the kids do not know about the impending apocalypse being isolated without TV or Radio at the cottage-home in the desert. This is where Before the Fall shines as a meditation on how we protect children and family from the truth for their own good, yet kill them with harbouring the secrets and lies. Considering the subject matter, it is remarkable how the film plays out so quietly and shifts genre so elegantly from morbid family drama to western existentialism to set-piece action picture as the acts go along. The underlying fact that all the struggles, physical and emotional are not going to matter in a few days yield some fresh new flavours, imparting the film with a savage grace worthy of the attention of any fan of genre films that step over and above their genre. It should also be mentioned that Spain seems to be the best treasure trove on the planet for astonishing child actors. Performances across the board here are convincing, even if you get a bit squirmy as to what they put these kids through.