City of Pirates

Forget the pirates - there aren't any in Ruiz's provocative fairy-tale. But there is a lost boy, who has already massacred his family before he seduces his Wendy, in the shape of a downtrodden servant girl, and transports her to their Neverland (there isn't a city either). If Ruiz's 'free transcription' of Peter Pan sounds more like a subtitled Friday the 13th, it's because he takes the sexual undercurrent of children's literature as seriously as Angela Carter. The atmosphere is magical, perversely playful and macabre: in a moment of pure, surreal poetry, the boy-murderer sails a fleet of burning paper boats on a tide of his victim's blood. What really distinguishes this is a gripping performance by Alvaro as the haunted lover-cum-mother, and the images that are the very stuff of nightmares.