Rosie, the Devil in My Head (Patrice Toye)

ROSIE, THE DEVIL IN MY HEAD Patrice Toye Aranka Koppens

The place where I come from, the low countries (Belgium, Holland), is not known for brilliance in either music or cinema. I haven't been impressed by anything made over here, but Rosie is the very first time that I am. Rosie is the debut film of female director Patrice Toye who against all odds (almost no financing, a technical team that didn't cooperate, and just being a woman) made a gem of a movie. A movie about a fourteen year old girl who is the child of a teenage mother, who doesn't want to see her as her daughter, because she still considers herself too young. The film is about the struggle of an adolecent girl trying to get the love and attention from her surrounding and finding this in a boy that comes straight out of her books, dreams and thoughts. With him she finds a solution to her problems, a destructive solution.

Shot in the outskirts of Antwerp, depicting a very desolate area full of yellow grass, deserted buildings, rusting oil pipelines, grey blocks of flats, it's an absolute marvel seeing the young Aranka Koppens radiate through her part and stealing the hearts of everyone watching. Keeping the audience on the edge of their seats until the very end. LOS AMANTES DEL CIRCULO POLAR Julio Medem Najwa Nimri, Fele Martinez

Julio Medem can do no wrong with me. I was so impressed by Tierra that I almost felt in love. I still get a warm feeling all over thinking about that film. Later I saw his earlier films La ardilla roja and Vacas which did almost the same to me. Maybe it also was because I really like the sight of Emma Suarez playing in all three films. This is his first film without her and it shouldn't matter, but I was taken less by this film. It's still magically realistic. Half of it plays in Spain the other in Finland, a place I have dreamed of going some time, but the story somehow lacks the depth that was so overwhelming in the first three films. AFTERLIFE Kore-Eda Hirokazu

I'm always surprised how good Japanese cinema is. No matter how small the movie, now matter how simple the idea, it seldom is ruined in the ways Europeans can ruin a film by making some sort of statement and going over the top to get there, or the American smothering it in gooey tearjerking moments. Afterlife is based on a great idea. People who die don't go to heaven, no, they come in some sort of office where they are asked to think about their lives and pick out the happiest moment they had, that will be the moment that is reenacted before their eyes just before their souls are released. The film is almost nothing more than people sitting at a desk just telling about their lives. This never bores, but what makes is even more perfect is the sudden undercurrent, this little story flowing in, that made it all the more perfect. Japanese cinema surprises. FOLLOWING Christopher Nolan Jeremy Theobald, Lucy Russel

The golden years of intense suspense and film noir have long gone. Nobody in their right mind would seriously try to revive a genre like that. Only a young and daring filmmaker would. Christopher Nolan did it. In his spare time, using lent equipment and studio time, financed by his own daytime job. Starring his friends. An amazing debut, which won a Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival 1999. Very rightly so.

Check out the interview AMERICAN HISTORY X Tony Kaye Edward Norton

It takes an Englishman, a director of commercials to make a film as serious and gripping as this. And in the end he doesn't even like to be mentioned. Tony Kaye is angy because his film was butchered by the lead actor and studio officials. But even this butchered film shows that it is a very gripping and grandiose movie, stylised, laden, tense, epic, leaving the viewer with doubts about good and bad, left and right, up and down.