A family patriarch is convinced after a night’s dream that his daughter-in-law is the incarnation of the Goddess Kali, in Ray’s quietly devastating attack on religious dogma, with 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore’s haunting gaze at the center of a tug-of-war between blind faith and rationalism.
Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
Oshima’s WWII anti-war melodrama feels more like theatre than cinema, as the quartet of compelling actors (Bowie, Sakamoto, Conti, and Kitano), queer undercurrents, and a highly emotional epilogue elevate it into something unexpectedly sublime.
As per tradition, here are my predictions for the Oscars 2026!
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 20/24 (22/24 if including dark horses)
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A fervent, playful self-portrait that sees a bubbly yet wistful Varda at her most inventive, crafting a near-formless cinematic salute that reimagines what personal documentary filmmaking can be.
An oddly-paced yet riveting plunge into covert histories, Filho’s Cannes award-winning work plays like a spectral puzzle—pulpy, sly, and quietly haunting, turning Brazilian political trauma into a carnivalesque memory piece.
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
A quietly defiant and unconventional anti-war film, Melville turns passivity into resistance, using repetition, silence, and minute gestures to probe the human soul, as a highly-cultured Nazi officer installs himself in the home of an old Frenchman and his niece.
One of Kaurismaki’s funniest and most fascinating deviations in his oeuvre, this East Goes West road movie sutures music, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and deadpan humour into a pseudo-documentary, crowned by arguably the best hairstyle ever committed to celluloid.
Eternality Tan 