With critics and delegates around the bars of Rotterdam's film festival complaining that this year's event is over-subscribed (most public screenings are already sold out, and even the press screenings are sometimes booked up - I missed the new Werner Herzog on account of this), the public are already making their views known via the festival's audience ratings.
Top so far among the great unwashed is the Stasi thriller Das Leben des Anderes, which gets a release here in April. Personally I found it better comedy than drama, with some fairly smug and reactionary revisionist views on the former east German socialist state, and strictly middlebrow as viewing. Still, it's not often a German film makes you laugh out loud.
Here are a few other movies I've taken in...
Fallen - Director: Barbara Albert - Austria, 2006 - Length: 80 mins
Following up the bleak but empathetic Free Radicals, the Austrian Barbara Albert has made her place certain as a new European auteur.
Repeating the themes of female bonding and betrayal established in her debut feature (which got a brief London release), the plot, on paper, could not appear more well-trodden. Six 30-something former schoolfriends (from TV presenter to probation-tagged drug addict) reconvene for a funeral and a wedding, offering them the opportunity for booze, confessions and new misdemeanors.
However, Albert's feel for naturalistic acting, swerveball lyricism and a typically Austrian wallowing in discomfort make this a gem.
Screaming of the Ants - Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf - Iran/France/India, 2006 - Length: 89mins
An only semi-successful foray into Indian mysticism and cod Euro art-house fare from the Iranian master and patriarch of a film-making family, Mohsen Makhalmbaf.
The most successful part is the baffling but beautiful verity•-style footage - of mystics, cripples, corpse burning and simple street and desert scenes - taken across India to amplify the somewhat familiar message that the sub-continent is different, a spiritual homeland with lessons for all.
Unfortunately, this makes up an ever-decreasing proportion of the film, which is instead given over to the two leads - an Iranian couple on a spiritual pilgrimage to find the "complete man" (him) and get pregnant (her). This Karma-Sutra style plotline, acted flatly with clashing lighting and not a morsel of humour, truly sinks the film. A bad fit, not redeemed by the better half. And a terrible print for a film festival premiere too.
M - Director: Hiroki Ryuichi - Japan, 2006 - Length: 110mins
A pedestrian, predictably "paint-it-by-numbers" take on one of mainstream cinema's perennial favourite themes - the housewife and mother who "harbours a dark secret", according to the film's promotional blurb. Or turns to prostitution, in other words.
Almost farcically clichéd - the cuckolded husband who's an office wage-slave, the hovering housewife, the gangland pimp - M wants to be deadpan controversial, but its numbingly obvious narrative arc deviates so little from the conventional that you're left howling at the screen.
Princess - Director: Anders Morgenthaler - Denmark, 2006 - Length: 80 mins
The "daring" subject matter - child porn, is used by Danish animator and first-time director Anders Morgenthaler to drive an animated revenge tragedy, as a priest rescues the five-year-old daughter of his dead sister from the porn and drugs industries that killed her mother.
This one is close to the bone, and violent, but ultimately strangely plodding and with queasy turns of mood that don't seem to be entirely intentional. It also features flat, Japanese-style draftsmanship on the animation.
