This latest from the visionary Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas divided the critics at Cannes but was still awarded the Best Director prize – a sure sign of a challenging and innovative work.

After a mesmerising extended opening in which the director’s infant daughter toddles though a field of cows and dogs as a thunderstorm moves in, what follows is clearly a very personal vision, contrasting childhood innocence against the iniquitous values and errant desires (for physical, sexual and capitalist domination) polluting the adult world.

If the subject matter is intimate and urgent – the architect protagonist realises the gift of life in highly dramatic circumstances – the film’s constructed like an innovative collage, as flashbacks (a boyhood vision of diabolical intent), flash-forwards (the children’s imagined future), and even metaphorical inserts (schools rugby as ideological battleground) manifest a dazzling first-person mosaic. Nonconformist to the core, it’s a film which urges viewers to take a journey into the future of cinema. (Notes by Trevor Johnston.)