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There’s a new and not-necessarily awful sub-genre in thrillers these days, where the hose is stepped on for hours until the twist is unravelled and water comes a-flooding out. When it’s done right, we’ve been led down a narrow path, shadows and fog obscuring details that were right in front of us the whole time, entertained even while being distracted. When it’s done wrong, it’s your Uncle George trying aimlessly to get a joke out at the dinner table. The Cat Vanishes is a quirky Argentinean psychological thriller that asks the audience to question sanity as a whole, all the while unable to stop giggling about the card it has up its sleeve.

Luis (played by Luis Luque) is being released from psychiatric care, declared sane after an incident that left a colleague bruised and battered. His wife Beatriz (played by Beatriz Spelzini… wait a...

A psychotic break has fractured Luis (Luis Luque) and Beatriz’s (Beatriz Spelzini) marriage in El gato desaparece [The Cat Vanishes], playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Proud parents of two, successful in life as a professor and translator respectively, and completely in love, they still prove ill equipped to handle mental instability. Brought on by the ceaseless toiling to validate his research and publish his magnum opus, paranoia sets in as ideas of sabotage begin to manifest. Accusations against his assistant at the university, Fourcade (Javier Niklison), are made while aggression takes hold. He beats his friend up in unjustified anger and then turns his violence onto Beatriz when the idea that she has been helping the traitor misguidedly appears logical. It is the sort of event that ruins lives, but Luis is lucky to find a second chance through psychiatric help, drugs, and compassion from those he wronged. The memory of unchecked and unprovoked chaos,...

"Ralf Huettner's sleeper hit Vincent Wants to Sea was the surprise best picture winner at the 61st German Film Awards, Germany's version of the Oscars." Scott Roxborough from Berlin for the Hollywood Reporter: "Florian David Fitz, who's better known as a TV performer here, won best actor for his starring performance in Vincent as a Tourette's sufferer who, once in his life, wants to see the ocean."

The Lolas, as these awards are called, have three categories for Best Film: Gold, which has gone to Vincent; Silver, which goes this year to Yasemin Samdereli's immigration comedy Almanya, also picking up the screenplay award (which Samdereli shares with her sister, Nesrin); and Bronze, presented to If Not Us, Who?, Andres Veiel's retelling of the love story between Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper and their breakup when Ensslin enters into her fateful relationship with Andreas Baader.

Tom Tykwer wins Best Director for Three,...