• Director: Nicolas Roeg
• United Kingdom, 1973
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Don’t Look Now is technically a horror movie, but it’s also a technical film, arty and aloof and not at all a genre standard. You could even see Meryl Streep playing the wife, but that would have made an already difficult film intolerable.

Roeg’s off-season Venice is cold and strangely alluring and he casts silence in a leading role. The nerves of the nervous become frayed by seemingly inocuous situations loaded with dread potential and queasy close-ups of minor characters, transforming them into grotesques.

At times Don’t Look Now can be irritating with its distant, dazed moodiness. Despite effective acting, this dispassionate viewpoint prevents us from sympathising with the protagonists John and Laura Baxter as they struggle to deal with the loss of their daughter. Ultimately the distance serves to lessen the impact of the plot’s climax, making viewing the film a chilly and unrewarding experience.

• Director: Walter Salles
• Brazil, 2001
• 

Sandwiched between the superb Central Station and the even better Motorcycle Diaries, Salles’ period adaptation of an Albanian novel makes memorable cinema out of the simplest of storylines.

Walter Carvalho’s cinematography expresses aridity, drudgery and wilderness in a style reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s westerns, as Tonho (played sensitively by Rodrigo Santoro) struggles to break out of the suffocating existence imposed on his family by a long-running blood feud.

In common with his great films to date, Behind the Sun is another lyrical example of the director’s attempts to breathe humanity into the most inhuman of environments and it succeeds with surprising economy.