My Nikifor

Philip French: It's an intriguing picture, with an 86-year-old actress playing the lead.

Reprise

Philip French: The film has the elegant exuberance of a display of indoor fireworks.

Opera Jawa

Peter Bradshaw: This gamelan musical by the Indonesian film-maker Garin Nugroho is an intricate oddity.

A Throw of Dice

Philip French: A remarkable silent movie, a co-production between India, Germany and Britain, made in Rajasthan in 1929.

Born and Bred

Philip French: A wilfully sad and desolate film, with an oppressive atmosphere you could push with a snow plough.

Born and Bred

Peter Bradshaw: Another typically intelligent, deeply involving piece of cinema.

Marigold

Philip French: In this clumsy movie, the twain of East and West meet with the aesthetic grace of the Amritsar massacre.

Ecoute le temps

Philip French: You keep on watching and wondering, but the picture barely rewards the attention one gives it.

Copying Beethoven

Philip French: The movie is a disappointingly conventional biopic in the romantic manner of such Hollywood films as A Song to Remember and Song Without End, but less funny.

The Bow

Retail: A teenage girl and an old man who never speaks share a boat. That's more or less it, apart from some exceptionally beautiful cinematography.

Taxidermia

Retail: Hungarian oddity with enough gross-out moments to merit comparison with comedy horror like Re-animator.