A delirious, nihilistic reimagining of the ‘One-Armed Swordsman’ tale, this is one of Tsui’s boldest achievements, as he disregards continuity and legible mise-en-scène for a whirlwind, impressionistic, and psychic wound of a movie.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
A Lithuanian woman decides to divorce her husband the day before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in this realistic Sundance Directing Award winner that finds striking resonance in the collision between the personal and political, focusing on one (privileged) family in crisis.
Dust, haunted technology, and political trauma mark this uncanny deadpan Thai comedy where the corporeal and supernatural coexist with grounded preposterousness, as a dead wife returns as a possessed vacuum cleaner to protect her misunderstood husband.
Revolutionary, overrated, or somewhere in between, Welles’s extraordinary debut turns power, ego, and misery into an enigmatic cradle-to-grave portrait of a larger-than-life figure—‘European’ in its artistic style, but fiercely American in its spirit of derring-do.
A Sundance award-winning documentary that captures the power of civil resistance with gripping immediacy, as it chronicles the Kenmure Street protests in Glasgow, after two Sikh men were taken from their home into a police van that was prevented by the community from departing.
A haunting blend of morbid realism and the fantastique, Franju’s cult French psychological horror follows a surgeon who, with an accomplice, lures and kills young women for their facial skin, as he attempts to transplant it onto his disfigured daughter.
A lonely OB-GYN in a rural Georgian hospital faces allegations of malpractice in Kulumbegashvili’s brutally slow-paced, if quietly devastating, sophomore feature—a Haneke-esque moral inquiry marked by hypnotic long takes and sublime use of film language.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
A pimpish young man who finds labour work to be ideological suspect tries to make ends meet by manipulating his lovers into sex workers in Pasolini’s harsh, unflinching debut feature, as his talky ‘neo-neorealist’ film offers a stinging commentary on Italy’s social and moral disintegration.
Eternality Tan 