OFFSCREENINGS

A man thinks his Chihuahua is trying to kill him. A top model is devastated when her pampered pooch is run over. And a supermarket security guard has to choose between the new girlfriend and his beloved Border Collie. Three tragicomedies about people and their dogs, each imbued with deadpan Belgian wit and style.

Penelope and Isidoros are adrift in time, never knowing if they’re waking up in the past, present or future. Can the Ministry of Lost Time help them keep track of their non-linear relationship? A sci-fi romance gets lyrical Greek Weird Wave treatment, building into a moving meditation on love, life and memory.

The corrupt mayor of a logging town has redevelopment plans, but meets resistance in a guitar-playing cowboy, a feisty immigrant, and the dreaded local Hellbug. Plympton conjures a fable full of surreal slapstick and musical numbers, lovingly hand-drawn in his inimitable Yellow Submarine-meets-The New Yorker style.

World War Two is over but survivors struggle with trauma amid the ashes of their city. A ramen bar owner, obliged to sell her body, bonds with an orphan and a shellshocked soldier in a makeshift family unit, but don’t expect comfort viewing from the third part of Tsukamoto’s searing anti-war trilogy. Grim but great.

A poncy French aristocrat, robbed in East European woods, lodges with a family awaiting the return of its patriarch. Spoiler: the man comes back as a vampire, played by a puppet! This is droll, absurd and unsettling - much like the film itself with its vintage patina, shroud-chewing sound design and creepy sex scenes.

Martial arts meet heavy metal as Rafael, a conscript on the Sino-Soviet border in 1973, is the sole survivor of an attack by bandits who set their kung-fu moves to Black Sabbath. Rafael embarks on a spiritual quest that leads him to an Eastern Orthodox monastery, and a delirious mash-up of wire-fu and wacky comedy.

A legendary New York video rental store closed in 2008, selling its entire stock to a small town in Sicily with the proviso that anyone with a membership card could still go there and rent a film. Two movie-mad documentarians go in search of the 55,000 DVDs and tapes in a true story that gets stranger by the minute.

The multiverse gets a decidedly non-Marvel makeover in this brain-scrambling noir thriller centred on a 1962 quantum physics convention in the Swiss Alps. A student, fixated on a beautiful jazz pianist who seems oddly familiar, becomes embroiled in murder, uncanny cloud formations and the ghosts of the Third Reich.

It’s 1967. Death-obsessed Catholic schoolgirl Françoise and her classmate Delphine sneak out to a party in the middle of the woods. This study in adolescent angst and not-quite vampirism skirts pretentiousness to weave a beguiling spell, thanks to the Rollin-esque ambience and a mesmerising central performance.

In the frozen north, a 19th century fur trapper woos a trader’s daughter but is beset by woodpeckers, wolves and beavers (played by actors in furry costumes). Looney Tunes meets The Revenant with a Guy Maddin-esque retro-aesthetic in a quasi-silent movie that pulls out all the stops in an orgy of barking mad slapstick.

The class struggle comes home to roost when a landowner is confronted by the farmworkers he plans to dismiss, and his wife takes refuge in their state-of-the-art armoured car. Bandeira pits opposing points of view against each other as the standoff escalates in nail-biting fashion on its way to a devastating denouement.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a Luxembourgian western, filmed in Belgium! In the 19th century, a woman with facial tattoos returns to her home village, like a female High Plains Drifter, to wreak vengeance on the castle-dwelling patriarchal clan that robbed her of her virginity and murdered her family.

Aisling Franciosi plays Ella, a filmmaker whose animated project eats away at her sanity in a fever dream of body horror that fully exploits the creepiness of the stopmotion process. Trippy nightclubs, drugs and a sinister little girl add to the unease as Ella takes the idea of meat puppetry to its horribly logical conclusion.

A serial killer, not entirely human, is sucking out the life essence of gay guys - "bang-smack right in the middle of fellatio" according to forensics. Two lesbian detectives are on the case in a cheap and cheerful mystery set in a Berlin where everyone speaks Spanish.

A serial killer stands trial in Montreal, watched obsessively by a fashion model who is determined to make him notice her. Meanwhile, she combs the dark web for videos of his sadistic crimes and befriends a young woman convinced of his innocence. This eerie, disturbing thriller will keep you guessing to the end.