Nick Willing’s handsome-looking Edwardian fable about fairies at the bottom of the garden spins a supernatural detective story that starts with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and leads to some seriously surreal whimsy. Early scenes paint an economical but atmospheric portrait of Britain after the First World War, a time when traditional religion is being supplemented with a hokey spiritualism which thrives on a grieving nation’s morbid credulity. It’s a climate which works to the advantage of young photographer Charles Castle (Toby Stephens), who, having lost his wife in a honeymoon accident, spends his days superimposing dead soldiers on to family tableaux, until, that is, the mysterious Bea Templeton (Frances Barber) visits his studio, clutching snaps of her daughters playing with fairies.
Convinced of their authenticity, Castle is soon following Bea to the country to run amok in the woods, romance the family governess (Emily Woof) and cross swords with Bea’s preacher husband, the beetle-eyed Ben Kingsley. Not one for a broad church, Kingsley’s charismatic minister decides to put a violent end to Castle’s unorthodox and, as he sees it, premature trips to “the other side”.Touching on the psychosis of grief, the transcendental power of love and post-war shifts in class and faith, this ambitious film ultimately spreads itself too thin.

Despite sumptuous photography and some fine performances (Phil Davis, Stephens’s sarcastic sidekick, is a gem), its energy and credibility evaporate as its mystery is resolved through ham-fisted melodrama and a swarm of nymphs who buzz around the hero’s head like so many computer- generated wasps.. Set in 1949, Arturo Ripstein’s Mexican version of The Honeymoon Killers stars Regina Orozco as Coral, a fat, single mother who answers an advertisement in the lonely hearts and meets up with the courtly Nicolas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), a rug-wearing conman. Undeterred by his penchant for seducing, robbing and murdering lonely women, the besotted Coral abandons her children to become his partner in bed and “business”. Played out with sombre deliberation against a backdrop of seedy, sepia- tinted poverty, Deep Crimson is a quietly compelling anatomy of violent amour fou.

Describing how amoral passion can turn ordinary people into monsters, Ripstein coolly clocks the grotesquery of his characters, but never allows them to become inhuman. Instead, he peppers their sedately paced serial-killing spree with moments of tenderness and vulnerability. Begun by blackmail and cemented by murder, their baleful romance is enriched further by a script full of mordant humour. “You look bigger than your photograph,” whimpers one future victim when her suitor’s “sister” looms large in the doorway. “I’ve always looked bigger,” snaps back Coral, who, while she may be a stuffed sofa of psychotic jealousy, still smarts when people comment on her weight.. In this experimental documentary, director Andrew Kotting makes an idiosyncratic odyssey around the national coastline. Part home movie, part road movie, his offbeat travelogue looks at the British people and landscape through the eyes of his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys, coming to the end of a long life, and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, who suffers from a condition called Joubert’s Syndrome, which may make hers a short one.