Cannes 2015: The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos

In The Lobtser, single people in a dystopian world are sent to a seaside hotel in which they have forty five days to find a companion and fall in love. If they fail, they are turned into the animal of their choice and released into the wild. And there are severe punishments for those who try to lie about their true feelings.

On paper, The Lobster logically should not have worked. Many promising European directors have had their fingers burned when turning to the English language (or worse, going to Hollywood!). Add to the mix a quirky premise and an international cast with various accents, it sounded like a recipe for disaster or some kind of arthouse Euro pudding (think the godawful Mr Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael). And yet…

Cannes 2015: Mad Max Fury Road by George Miller

Cannes sometimes has a stereotype attached to it, that it only shows pretentious, slow, arthouse (and for some, foreign films always mean arthouse!) but it has not been true for several decades now, it changed on that electrifying opening night of 1992, for which Giles Jacob had picked Basic Instinct. Since then, genre films (Body Snatchers the following years, the usual Midnight screenings) have found their space in the line up. And what a glorious day indeed when you can watch Mad Max Fury Road in the giant Theatre Lumiere with an audience of over 2000 journalists and industry not hiding their enthusiasm at all.

Cannes 2015: La Tête Haute by Emmanuelle Bercot

With such a different, unlikely choice for their opening film, it is as if the Cannes Film Festival wanted to send a message for the 2015 edition. After years of starry, mostly Hollywood outings with various degrees of critical reception (see the justified mauling of last year's unintentional comedy Grace of Monaco) and criticism for the lack of female directors in the official selection, they have given us the polar opposite of the previous years with La Tête Haute, a tough social drama directed by a woman, Emmanuelle Bercot.

BFI Cult: Eaten Alive by Tobe Hopper

Texan filmmaker Tobe Hooper peaked early. Following his freakout debut with the rarely seen hippie time capsule Eggshells (1969), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was only Hooper's second feature, but would go on to become an important and influential classic of atmospheric unease, changing the genre landscape forever and cementing Hooper's permanent place in the horror pantheon. For many, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is quite simply one of the greatest horror films ever made, a reputation which of course presents a problem for the budding filmmaker: bloom too early (and too exquisitely), and wilting inevitably follows. Even if Hooper would subsequently helm the odd estimable genre title such as Poltergeist (1982) or Lifeforce (1985), his has been a career of steady decline. By the new millennium, barely a quarter century after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was first digging its hook into stunned cinemagoers, Hooper was directing undistinguished straight-to-video schlock like Crocodile (2000).

Tears of God by Robert Hillyer Barnett - Review

The first thing we see in Robert Hillyer Barnett's feature debut is a movie camera, filmed head on as though it were filming us. The second thing we see, presumably in reverse shot as the true subject of that initial camera, is a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil), half-lost in shadow but visibly weeping - until the voice of a second woman is heard laughing off camera, and the woman in shot smiles, shakes her head and laughs too. If the first woman's tears are the titular Tears of God, they are also counterfeit - part of an actor's routine, performed for the (or at least a) camera. Before the title itself appears on screen, printed bright red in gothic font, the camera tracks through not just a wintry woodland, but also a dusty old movie theatre (which, it will turn out, is now serving as the church headquarters for a doomsday cult). In other words, whatever else it might be, Tears of God is a film very much concerned with its own status as a film, and with the mystic artifice of cinema itself, able to to capture otherwise forgotten or overlooked truths, and to preserve, even perhaps revive, the dead.

Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron by Joss Whedon - Review

How do you follow a mega smash hit like Avengers Assemble, with the film being so far the third most successful at the worldwide box office behind Titanic and Avatar? Any other studios would have just safely served us a rehash of the first film and counted the dollars, but not Marvel. The studio has been taking several risks and gambles since Iron Man, at once respecting the fans while playing with their expectations too, and it has paid off big time, with the most incredible run of commercial hits which have made them the envy of all the other studios in Hollywood, who are all busy trying to launch their own universe (rather pathetically in some cases).

In Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Starck's attempt to create artificial intelligence to protect the world against further threats cruelly backfires when his creation, Ultron, turns against its creator and humanity! It is up to the Avengers to team up once again to defeat this formidable foe.

BFI Cult: Popcorn by Mark Herrier

Popcorn is a hidden gem of 1990s horror cinema. It might have gone direct-to-video without passing Go and collecting £200, but that just makes it ripe for rediscovery and deserving of a second chance with fans of the genre. It is well worth your time and effort tracking this one down.

Set in an old picture palace, a group of students launch a fundraiser for their university film club and stage an all-nighter of cheesy old titles reminiscent of William Castle schlock. They renovate the place – sorting out the electrics – and hire costumes, equipment and memorabilia for the occasion. The films-within-the-film are: Mosquito, The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man and The Stench. Each of these comes with a gimmick that is manipulated by a maniacal killer and used to orchestrate a gruesome – and very real – death. There is another film, too. Something far more dangerous and sinister. An art flick!