A significant work of Malayalam cinema, Aravindan’s work, by turns exuberant and elegiac, about a circus act coming to a rural Indian village teases out the hypnotic and exhibitionistic qualities of performative art in ways that challenge our unquestioned spectatorship.
Assayas’ first feature isn’t really great but it still is an enigmatic treatise on the tension between youthful idealism and fatalism as a group of friends with music ambitions rethink their existence after a plan goes awry, leaving blood in their hands.
Remarkably crafted and told refreshingly in a non-linear way, Guadagnino transforms tennis into a three-way psychological match in hell, where romantic entanglements serve up ‘underhands’ and ‘double-dealings’ that take morally contentious turns.
Exquisitely shot and not without its dense subject matter, Im’s transcendent film is a masterful look at secularism and asceticism from a bold, singular lens of Buddhism.
Words have little meaning but faces bear the truth in Antonioni’s remarkable treatise on modern alienation and ennui as it follows a well-to-do couple facing a sinking marriage on an afternoon and night out.
Probably Fincher’s zeitgeistiest film, this initially misunderstood but now modern classic traverses effortlessly between popular and cult realms as its unflinching takedown of capitalism and consumerism is marked by a thick, poisoned air of existential malaise.
A Trans-Siberian train journey turns into a ‘Trans-Mongolian’ detour on the steppes as a group of Westerners find themselves ‘enjoying’ the hospitality of a Mongolian Princess and her people, in an oddly-structured but exuberant work that challenges exoticist assumptions in East-West cultural discourse.
A ragtag group of grave robbers leads the way in Rohrwacher’s continuously inventive and occasionally sublime film, about the desires of humans to continue searching for existential meaning in both physical and metaphysical realms.
A comforting if bittersweet retelling of Sammo Hung’s formative years at the Peking Opera School where he plays a master mentoring his younger self, as it explores tradition and passion at the crossroads of societal and cultural change.
Scorsese’s criminally ignored work based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is exquisite and expressive, as the psychological violence of complicated romances and illicit affairs threaten to implode in the cloistered high society of New York’s ‘Gilded Age’.
Eternality Tan 