Unrelated

Unrelated

Anna (Kathryn Worth) is a woman in her mid-40s, who arrives alone at the Italian holiday home of an extended bourgeois family. She's the old school friend of matriarch Verena (Mary Roscoe), but is soon distracted from 'the olds' and drawn to the vitality and energetic escapades of the teenagers in the group, and in particular to cocky Oakley (Tom Hiddleston).

It's gradually and subtly revealed that all is not right in Anna's world, and that the time spent with the people more than half her age is an attempt to fill a void and claim something missing in her own life.

Joanna Hogg's impressive debut feature feels refreshing and original. It is a bold and brutally honest portrait of a woman of a certain age, a comment on middle-class sensibilities that is capable of wrong-footing the viewer at every turn, where what might be seen as minor, everyday concerns are presented in such a way that they become epic, achingly touching, often tense and quite scary.

Professional and non-professional actors combine to credible effect, the dialogue is spontaneous and realistic, while Hogg's static camera frames the action distinctively.

Michael Hayden

Maude

A lonely old widow discovers that the world is full of wicked possibilities, with a little help from a Japanese talking teddy bear.