There’s a solid chance that you haven’t heard of most of these movies. Yet they exist – out there somewhere as a thorn in the side of movie fans trying to see as much as possible. Nuggets of potential waiting to be picked up from the movie orphanage by a distributor and given a warm home with cup holders in every seat. The European Film Market is fascinating for that reason and for the way people attend it. Tickets this year were around $600, but that’s a reasonable price for companies sending representatives trying to find the next moneymaker for their company or the hot movie to bring to their festival. That means screenings come complete with people on cell phones and unimpressed buyers walking out after ten minutes to hustle next door to see if the other movie playing has any promise to it. It’s a bizarre way to watch movies, but it makes a kind of sense given the massive size of the movie list compared to the tiny amount of time to see everything. There were upwards of 675 movies in the EFM this year, all of them with their own selling points. Here are the 87 most interesting-sounding with descriptions found in the official catalog. For the most part, I haven’t seen these movies (and didn’t even know about many of them until the Berlin Film Festival), but they all have something going for them that should earn them a spot on your radar.

Doing homage well is a difficult enough task, but creating a new film that harkens back to a certain genre or timeperiod provides a whole new set of issues. While there’s been a onslaught of grindhouse homages in the wake of Rodriguez and Tarantino’s double-feature Grindhouse, giallo has also seen a few entries. Perhaps the best or at least most widely recognized title was the Belgian film Amer, a fever-dream of a movie told in three parts. While Amer nailed the framing, lighting, color and soundtrack that epitomized Italian giallo films, it did so at the expense of story, featuring a fractured, blurred narrative. It’s a case of style over substance and while the style is certainly impressive, the substance is certainly missed. Last Screening is another film that wears its giallo influences on its proverbial sleeve, but it does so in service of the story being told. Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) is a bit of a loner. He spends his days working in a small cinema as a sort of one man band selling tickets, working the projection booth and acting as general manager. His nights are dedicated to more sinister passions, hunting down young woman and murdering them, taking a very specific item as a souvenir. Unfortunately, the theater isn’t doing so well and the owner has decided to shut it down. Sylvain takes almost no notice of this, continuing on as if nothing is happening, assuring the theaters’s few loyal patrons that the rumors about closing are untrue and