You can only double down so many times before you go bust. It's maybe around the time that Bennie is dousing his head (his own head) in a trough of turbid water that he realizes he's made one too many bad decisions and nothing he does from here on out is going to redeem him. Or maybe it's confronting his paymasters, with the merchandise in a basket - the only thing of sentimental significance left - that he talks himself…

"You're not old enough to know how bad life gets."
"Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."

I think that's most likely my problem as well as far this movie goes. I guess I was expecting something darker, more harrowing than what essentially amounts to The Wonder Years where everyone dies at the end. I never liked Kevin in that and our nameless narrator here (never sure which of the four boys it is, my guess is the tall…

Darkly oblique, low key character study of a damaged mind. Philip is a puppeteer by profession, who is forced to return to his childhood home following his disgrace at his last paying gig. He terrified the kids with his puppet, a macabre arachnid creation with a blank head resembling his own. This is Possum, an alter ego which has haunted him since entering his life in childhood, preventing him from becoming a functioning adult.

Scored by a brooding collection of…

I'm not sure what I was expecting - neo-realism or retro-styled kitchen sink drama perhaps - but Mark Jenkin's entrancing film is a labour of love that borders on anti-realism with its expressionistic editing, montage and post-synced sound. It's a defiantly experimental, subtly confrontational piece that stays true to his own Dogme-like Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 manifesto. It looks like a long lost artefact, rescued from oblivion, but has an unmistakably modern sensibility.

The way the sound is entirely…