This largely assured debut feature by Pakistani director Saim Sadiq boldly tackles themes of patriarchy and transgender as a young, married man becomes smitten by a trans woman.
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This largely assured debut feature by Pakistani director Saim Sadiq boldly tackles themes of patriarchy and transgender as a young, married man becomes smitten by a trans woman.
This beautifully animated adaptation of several Murakami’s texts is talky and philosophical as it flits between surrealism and a sense of groundedness, urging us to find or create meaning in life even when there might be none.
Song Kang-ho is superb in this highly-engaging mainstream drama based on the dark history that was the 1980 Gwangju Uprising as a taxi driver unwittingly brings a German reporter to the site.
Petzold’s Berlinale Grand Jury Prize winner, about a group of friends and strangers at a holiday house as a forest fire blazes many miles away, is a strong, terrifically scripted and effortless portrayal of human relationships under scrutiny and pretence.
Light-hearted and mildly amusing, Ozu’s most accessible late-career work explores the generation gap and quirks of communal communication amid a rise in consumerism in a modernising Japan.
A sentient buffalo, a foolish servant sent across time and a shepherd whose days are numbered become mythical figures in Marcello’s magical realist docu-tale that features ravishing images of bucolic Italy, though the film rarely resonates in a deeper way than imagined.
A somewhat convoluted but still intriguing Chinese spy mystery set during WWII as agents and double agents conspire to accelerate or derail Japanese progress in the war.
A Brazilian feature debut to savour, from the weathered beauty of rural villages to compelling performances by the cast as an Argentinian drug kingpin seeks refuge in the home of a family, causing tensions to simmer.
Ripstein’s startling work is the OG ‘Dogtooth’, about a man who has locked his wife and children in his house for nearly two decades, at once so infuriating to watch and a bleak satire on the hypocrisy of toxic patriarchy and the extremes of parental love.
A sprawling historical epic set during China’s Warring States period as one king oppresses another king and his people—there’s a sense of tragic grandiosity to the overwrought melodrama while this shorter restored version is still too long.