An excellent Charlotte Rampling plays one half of a couple who have been together for more than four decades as they face a marital crisis that might prove to be insurmountable in Haigh’s delicate take on the meaning of love as refracted by secrets from the distant past.
Illegal makeshift houses without a roof will be torn down by the police in this underrated and heartfelt piece by De Sica, as a poor newlywed couple forced out onto the streets struggle to build theirs in time.
A Fellini classic featuring Giulietta Masina with arguably her greatest performance, this spirited tale of a prostitute who desires to change her life is at once heartbreaking and life-affirming.
A saintly donkey’s journey on acid, but Skolimowski’s elusive, fragmentary work is also earthy, as he gives us a hallucinatory, at times visually dazzling, piece that pays obvious homage to Bresson’s much sparer and more spiritual ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’.
A young woman gets married but her authoritarian father refuses to let her out of his sight in this grim and unnerving domestic drama with elements of horror, directed with vehemence by the great Mike De Leon.
It will surely spark more conversations on women’s agency in dealing with sexual assault and toxic masculinity, but Polley’s work is visually uninteresting, and the performances might sometimes feel maudlin.
This could very well be the first-ever Holocaust drama, about a group of resilient women who must attempt to survive during the last months of the war, startlingly shot on location at Auschwitz, with many cast and crew who survived the concentration camps.
Marker’s legendary work, comprised of a montage of still photographs with narration, is not just one of cinema’s most famous shorts, but a thought-provoking look at the impossibility of escaping the claws of time.
It’s difficult to have an opinion on Schanelec’s new film, which is decidedly inscrutable though it retains the German slow cinema auteur’s unique sensibilities as it explores themes of fate, guilt and grief in an elusive way.
We haven’t had a great anti-war film in years—this WWI piece comes just as timely in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is as technically accomplished and emotionally involving as some of the finest entries of the genre.
Eternality Tan 