If you go down to the woods tonight you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite as rich, strange or plain scary as this genre-mashing magic-realist thriller from the visionary Mexican director of Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Hellboy.

Shot in Spain and set in the bitter aftermath of the Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark cousin of Alice In Wonderland that pointedly contrasts the evils of human beings above ground with the creepy supernatural beasts below.

Ivana Baquero is terrific as Ofelia, a bookish young girl who is lured into a mysterious subterranean kingdom while her widowed mother Carmen (Ariadne Gil) struggles with her bullying new fiancé, Vidal. Played by Sergi Lopez, Vidal is a sadistic Captain in Franco’s army who thinks nothing of torturing innocent villagers in pursuit of anti-fascist partisans.

Pan’s Labyrinth is unashamedly a fantasy yarn, but freighted with enough political subtext and visceral human cruelty to transcend the genre’s geek boy reputation. Admittedly some of Ofelia’s underworld digressions threaten to slow down a meandering plot, while Vidal veers perilously close to pantomime caricature. But viewed through the melodramatic eyes of a lonely girl, Guillermo del Toro’s visually ravishing fairy tale makes perfect sense, hits all the right gothic notes, and ends on a satisfying emotional crescendo.

The War You Don’t See is a compelling, hard-hitting documentary which explicitly poses and sets about answering the controversial question – has mainstream media become a part of rapacious war-making?

The disturbing answer would appear to be yes, as the damning evidence is stacked up during the course of this startling exposé from John Pilger – focusing on the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and how each has been portrayed by the UK and US television medias.

Pilger also examines the history of the relationship between the media and government in times of conflict going as far back as World War I and explores the impact of this on the information provided for public consumption. He shows us how mainstream media rather than investigating the truth often opts to echo and promote the government’s war propaganda.

This point is poignantly made with WWI footage of soldiers crying for their mothers as they lay dying on the battlefields – footage that was almost never shown to the public.

Similarly he argues that today’s public receives a very filtered and fragmented picture of the reality of war from the media, with the full toll of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan being concealed from Western audiences, as well as the abuse of civilians by British and American troops.

The film reveals a repeated and widespread failure on the part of mainstream television media to objectively scrutinise or distance itself from governments’ official line or indeed propaganda. A glaring example of this is highlighted by the reporting of government claims that Iraq possessed WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In probing interviews Pilger holds Fran Unsworth, the BBC Head of Newsgathering, and David Mannion, Editor-in-Chief of ITV News, to account. Pilger raises a pertinent question with Unsworth. He inquires how it is decided which ‘voices’ will gain air time and if so how much, how often and at what times of the day.

Pilger uncovers the fact that one US journalist had personally verified that there were no weapons of mass destruction at any of the sites the US government claimed there were, but despite this his story was ignored by the mainstream media.

CBS news anchor Dan Rather makes the astonishing admission to Pilger that if journalists had been doing their job and tried to establish the truth, rather than merely relying on official briefings, the Iraq war might never have happened.

The War You Don’t See is ambitious in its scope. It also assesses the role embedded journalists have and to what extent their perspective is compromised by the military. It looks at the part played by independent journalists and the obstacles they face that too often prevent them getting the truth to the public.

Latterly the film explores the function of whistleblowers such as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and former senior British Foreign Office official Carne Ross and the media reporting of the hostilities between the Palestinians and Israelis.

But it concludes on a burning question: Why has the media been so complicit in keeping the public in the dark and what pressures have been brought to bear on it?

La Zona is a gated community in Mexico City, where the wealthy residents are surrounded by walls and surveillance systems to protect themselves from the violence of the outside world. When three youths break into La Zona, a violent crime ensues, leaving four corpses: a resident, a security guard and two of the youths.

When the residents discover that one of the youths is still inside La Zona, they decide to enact vigilante justice and organise armed militias to search for him. Meanwhile, young Alejandro (Daniel Tovar) has a big decision to make when he finds 16-year-old Miguel (Alan Chavez) hiding in his basement.

La Zona feels like it’s set in a future that’s literally minutes away – we already have both gated communities and ever-present CCTV cameras, so it’s not hard to imagine what would happen if everyone went a little Lord of the Flies. The film is also keenly aware that mob mentality can be a terrifying thing, though there are other, equally shocking moments, such as when the ostensible hero (or at least, a character who represents our only hope for justice) suddenly punches one of the few sympathetic characters in the face.

The performances are excellent, though Maribel Verdu (who receives the equivalent of a Special Guest Star credit) is badly underused. Alan Chavez is excellent as the terrified Miguel, while Daniel Tovar is suitably ambiguous as Alejandro – when he first finds Miguel you genuinely don’t know if he’s trying to help him or setting him up.

Director Rodrigo Pla orchestrates some genuinely suspenseful scenes and has an eye for striking imagery, particularly during the sewage pipe chase scene. The film also recalls the classic 1970s paranoia movies, in that the brutality and corruption of the police force is just as sickening as the violence.

La Zona is a gripping thriller that is both suspenseful and deeply disturbing. As such, it’s definitely worth seeing, even if it’s ultimately rather depressing.

When 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her streetwise brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos) embarks on a desperate mission to rescue her. After crossing the U.S.-Mexico border by stowing away in the boot of his car, Jorge meets Ray (Kevin Kline), a cop who’s on a personal mission of his own.

When Jorge convinces Ray that he’s telling the truth, the pair join forces and follow the trail all the way to New Jersey, where Adriana is due to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, Adriana forms a bond with Veronica (Alicia Bachleda), a young Polish woman who’s been tricked into the sex trade by the same gang behind her kidnapping.

German director Marco Kreuzpaintner (hand-picked by producer Roland Emmerich) maintains a decent pace throughout and orchestrates some extremely tense scenes; he also manages to suggest some pretty horrible goings-on without giving in to exploitation scenes or cliché. In addition, the film is beautifully shot, thanks to stunning cinematography by Daniel Gottschalk.

The characters are extremely well written (Jorge is by no means a typical hero – we first meet him mugging an American tourist) and the performances are superb. Kline is intriguingly cast against type (weirdly, he doesn’t appear until around 40 minutes into the film) and there’s strong support from Marco Perez, as Adriana’s captor, who’s struggling with his conscience.

Adapted from a magazine article by Peter Landesman, Jose Rivera’s script is extremely powerful, throwing an unflinching light on every stage of the sex trafficking business, while painting a pretty bleak picture as to why it’s so difficult to stop – a caption at the end quotes a State department official, essentially admitting that the problem is being ignored at a government level.

Trade is a well written and impressively acted but the documentary aspect of the movie is a little overwhelmed by the melodrama. However, the powerful message of the movie makes it worthwhile viewing.

Niña Quebrada is the story of Lucena, a teenage girl who runs away from her family in Mexico for the love of a boyfriend who promises her a better life in Los Angeles. The reality, unbeknown to her, is that she has been sold into sex slavery. Against the backdrop of an illegal cockfighting ring, Lucena must fight for her life to escape the horrors of this nightmarish world of child prostitution and human trafficking.

Waste Land by director Lucy Walker documents Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz experience as he travels back to his native country to collaborate with the garbage workers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho – the world’s largest rubbish dump.

Muniz is known for his inventive use of materials and has previously created a series using unwanted junk. He has also worked with street kids in both Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and says in the film, “I’ve reached a stage in my career where I want to give back.”

Filmed over three years, Waste Land depicts Muniz’s physical and emotional journey, from the embryonic idea of painting the garbage workers, to the finished compositions – recreations of photographic images of the labourers assembled using trash from the site.

Walker juxtaposes close-up shots of huge pyramids of rubbish with aerial views of the landfill site from a distance: tiny figures move about, reminiscent of worker ants. The camera flies past the iconic Christ The Redeemer statue, which towers over Rio de Janeiro – its arms outstretched towards Copacabana and the surrounding affluent districts.

It’s interesting to note that its back is turned on the poorest areas of the city, including the dump at Jardim Gramacho.

The most surprising aspect of Muniz’s first tour of Jardim Granacho is the happy atmosphere there. The workers, known as ‘catadores,’ greet the artist with warmth and amiability. Searching through tons of stinking, putrid waste, they describe themselves not as garbage workers, but as ‘recyclable material collectors’.

They have much pride in their work, and many talk of the dignity they feel at earning an honest crust, rather than prostituting themselves or drifting into crime. One worker, Valter, says, “One single can is of great importance, because 99 is not 100.”

Jardim Gramacho is by no means a disorganised place, thanks in the main to Tião Santos, a young man who formed the Association of Pickers of Jardim Gramacho.

A profoundly inspirational leader, Santos has created a workable system that provides the catadores with regular wages. He also oversaw the development of community centres and other initiatives aimed at improving the workers’ lives and those of their families.

The bond between the highly likeable Muniz and the dedicated Santos becomes stronger as the men work in tandem on the project. Santos himself is transformed into one of the artworks – a brilliant take on Jacques-Louis David’s infamous painting ‘The Death of Marat’.

Proceeds generated by the finished pieces are to be given back to the ACAMJG, and it doesn’t take much to persuade the handpicked workers to get involved. Here the issue of a documentary maker’s role in ensuring the wellbeing of filmed subjects raises its head. Is it ethical to take the catadores away from Jardim Granacho to work on the project? Once they have seen the world outside the dump, how can they go back?

It is difficult to watch their struggle. One worker named Isis (who helps to recreate a Picasso) seems acutely vulnerable, yet all but one of the catadores Muniz works with finds a way to better their life.

Waste Land is a well balanced film that explores the difficult lives of catadores without ever patronising them, and illustrates the unfeigned humanity behind their friendships and shared challenges.

Muniz builds genuine alliances and friendships, and his desire to support the workers in bettering themselves makes for a touching, provocative and extremely emotional documentary. Highly recommended.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful is very much the kind of unrestrained, thematically ambitious film made only after a filmmaker has proven themselves on terra firma following a run of work that has hit both critically and commercially. While his musings on humanity are as bleak as ever, and the film is unmistakably his most relentlessly gloomy, Biutiful is a confronting, powerful film that finds Iñárritu comfortably at his most audacious, topped by a mesmerising, Oscar-nominated performance from the ever-reliable Javier Bardem.

Uxbal (Bardem) is a drifter, weaving through Barcelona’s grimy underworld like a phantom, acting as a negotiator between the gossamer-thin illusions of authority – corrupt cops and snide factory owners – and those who rail against them – drug dealers and immigrant workers – while also having the ability to speak to the dead briefly before they pass to the other side, exploiting his ability and grief-stricken loved ones for cash. After a surprise cancer diagnosis numbers his days considerably, Uxbal comes to consider what his life – up to this point amounting to little more than bottom-feeding and crass manipulation – will mean for the legacy he leaves his children, and briskly goes about trying to make a better life for them before he departs.

While Biutiful is far from Iñárritu’s best work – though that isn’t a particularly weighty criticism given the quality of his output – it leaves the impression of being truest to his vision, unfettered by the need to engage in strictly plausible physical scenarios for the sake of the “real drama” that typically gets Academy recognition.

Instead, Iñárritu discovers grand emotional truths amid his peculiar brand of magical realism, and though the supernatural elements are smartly downplayed and massaged disarmingly into the gritty travelogue of Barcelona’s putrid gutters, it is liable to be Biutiful’s most divisive element. Though the film would play just as well without the incongruent otherworldly scenes, it is not these on which the film’s success rests; that is Javier Bardem, who not only runs with the ball, but jettisons it off to another dimension entirely.

Bardem is astonishingly good in a subdued, smouldering performance, which bests the sort of calculated contemplation that George Clooney attempted with mixed results in last year’s The American. How Bardem succeeds where Clooney did not is in populating his anguished glances with a heart and a soul, abetted unquestionably by the film’s soulful and emotionally authentic, if deeply unpleasant, series of events. As a work much like Clooney’s in which dialogue is light and faces tell the tale, Bitufiul’s meditative elements could so easily have devolved into a self-consciously moody mug-fest, yet there is plenty of humanity, and plenty for Uxbal to talk – and occasionally shout – about, allowing Bardem to essentially have his cake and eat it; he works the scrunched face and tortured eyes better than anyone, while also emoting in more surface-level ways, doing both wonderfully.

The success of the film lives and dies with Bardem, for while it is moving and dramatically potent, the grim reality of Iñárritu’s well-thumbed worldview may have proven too unwieldy in the hands of a lesser actor. In a film which is essentially a series of increasingly devastating scenes of abuse, exploitation, illness, regret, sadness and longing, Bardem surrenders the humanity of his deeply flawed character with heartbreaking precision. That he is able to make of Uxbal an even slightly sympathetic figure is his real triumph, and it anchors the perceived difficulty of the material.

While certainly padded and ponderous at 147 minutes, Biutiful is brave, unabashedly heart-rending filmmaking, topped by Javier Bardem’s strongest, most nuanced performance to date, and he is unequivocally the reason that you should see it.

Jose Padilha’s action-packed police movie Elite Squad 2 has shot to the top as Brazil’s highest grossing domestic film and it’s on track to surpass Avatar as the nation’s all-time box office champ.

Brazilian trade magazine Filme B, which cites the latest box office report from state-run film financing agency Ancine, said on Wednesday that Elite Squad 2 has raked in about US$59 million after a two-month run in theatres, eclipsing the 1976 release of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands as Brazil’s most successful hit.

Produced by Globo Filmes and Zazen Producoes, Elite Squad 2 centres on a special police unit that battles armed drug dealers in a Rio de Janeiro slum. The release of the film comes at a time as police and military operations intensify in Rio de Janeiro’s shantytown districts. The crackdown on crime is part of ongoing efforts to spruce up the city as it prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Recent conflicts have left scores of people dead in two of the city’s most crime-ridden neighbourhoods.

Elite Squad, Padilha’s freshman feature, won the Golden Berlin Bear in 2008. Elite Squad 2 will make its North American debut in the out-of-competition Spotlight section at Sundance in January.

In Andrés Livov Macklin’s poignant new documentary A Place Called Los Pereyra, the lives of schoolchildren in an isolated and impoverished village in Argentina are affected in unexpected ways when wealthy teenage girls visit on their annual weeklong charity mission.

Subtle, sweet, and often humorous, A Place Called Los Pereyra examines adolescence, charity and the clash of two worlds.

More information (trailer, reviews, upcoming screening) is available at www.lospereyra.com.

In the movies, hostage situations are a sure-fire way to guarantee suspense and drama. And while there are always moments of tension, the vast majority of the time the situation is resolved neatly, the hostage-taker is taken out by a bullet (or just led away in handcuffs if he/she a criminal with a good heart). But, as the real-life hostage-taker in the absolutely riveting documentary, Bus 174, keeps shouting to police, ‘This ain’t no action movie!’

In the summer of 2000, Sandro de Nascimento, a 22 year-old street kid living in Rio de Janeiro, boarded a bus waving a gun and demanding everyone’s money. What should have been a fast grab-and-run to fuel Sandro’s prodigious cocaine habit quickly deteriorated into a hostage situation that started out badly and kept getting worse.

The cameras were there almost before the cops, allowing the entire event to unfold live on Brazilian TV. The cops that show up at the scene are useless. They stand around like spectators, allowing journalists and gawkers to wander practically right up to the parked bus. At one point, viewers even see a man blithely bicycle past no more than a few dozen feet from the scene. This brazen incompetence continues throughout the day, lessening only somewhat after the slightly more professional Rio SWAT team arrive. The whole situation brings to mind the hapless blunders of the Munich Olympics hostage situation captured in One Day in September. The police are so ill-equipped they don’t even have radios.

Directors Felipe Lacerda and José Padilha use generous amounts of the live TV footage to tell their tale, interspersing it – more so in the beginning, less so later on when things begin to build to a climax – with interviews with cops who were involved, Sandro’s family members and friends, and others. At first, not much of the actual crime is shown, though we see Sandro stalking back and forth inside the bus, wrapping a towel around his head, putting sunglasses on and trying to get one of the hostages to drive the bus. Bus 174 builds Sandro’s past with exacting care, contrasting his horrible life with hauntingly gorgeous aerial shots over Rio.

Sandro was raised in a Rio slum where, at the age of 10, he watched as three knife-wielding men butchered his mother. Although his aunt (who was interviewed for the film) took him in, Sandro soon ran away and became one of the thousands of street kids thronging Rio. He was one of the kids who survived the infamous Candelária massacre in 1992 – eight of Sandro’s friends were gunned down in cold blood by the police – a fact that Sandro cannot stop repeating to the cops surrounding the bus. Stints in juvenile detention and prison, mixed with petty crime and the brain-addling glue sniffing that’s ‘de rigueur’ for Rio street kids, constitute the rest of Sandro’s life, up to the bus incident.

While the film is effortlessly dramatic, Lacerda and Padilha also managed to create a work of spectacularly insightful social reportage. Just as Sandro’s life and environment are dissected, so are all other aspects of the event, from the hostages, to police tactics and mistakes (told by a cop hooded for protection), and the life of street kids (related by a kid who talks blithely of slashing cop’s throats and setting robbery victims on fire). Commentary by a rather windy sociologist is less effective. Although he speaks eloquently of the fatal invisibility of those like Sandro, his remarks are rather obvious in light of more direct testimony captured elsewhere in the film.

When Bus 174 builds to its conclusion, it’s like a runaway train, something unstoppable and terrifying. Although Lacerda and Padilha have by that point given every reason for viewers to understand Sandro’s predicament, they never stoop to taking sides, managing somehow to point the finger at all the right people – the police, the media, a city that would rather see these children dead than help them – without negating Sandro’s culpability. The final scenes, as police snipers miss every opportunity to take Sandro down, as the media creeps closer, and the hostages play out fake dramas for the cameras under Sandro’s orders, constitute some of the most powerful images ever filmed.

In the end, it isn’t an action movie, and it isn’t just another true-crime documentary; Bus 174 stands alone as a cold, sad requiem for a generation of the lost.