Seduction and intimacy seem to be desirable and repulsive at the same time in this key work of the Greek Weird Wave as the greyish, emotionless world of a young woman and her dying father is depicted with eccentricity.
Tightly structured, verbose and eschewing high-stakes action, Soderbergh’s deceptively genial chess game of a spy thriller conflates the professional and the personal as one half of a married couple working for the same intelligence agency is suspected of being treasonous.
A Korean man is hanged but doesn’t die in Oshima’s complex if puzzling political farce, built out of layers of thematic juxtapositions and performative gestures, as the ghastly spectre of Japanese imperialism and social injustices rear their ugly heads.
Aster reinvents his wheel of perverse creativity with this epic three-hour odyssey as a man (Joaquin Phoenix in a fantastic performance) suffering from chronic anxiety and the inability to take responsibility embarks on a Freudian journey of self-confrontation.
Varda’s Golden Lion winner is a bleak exploration of a young female drifter’s (Sandrine Bonnaire in an extraordinary performance) unapologetic defiance of the personal and social obligations that seek to tie down her free self.
A cautionary tale with impressive world-building, Szulkin’s totalitarian mini-universe on the verge of anarchy—or annihilation—is set in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust as people are holed up in a crumbling dome.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Bruce Lee’s only directed feature is an amusing actioner with cartoony characters, an ultra-thin plot and pacing issues, culminating in one of the most iconic showdowns in martial arts cinema.
A free-form experiment that sees the filmmaker putting together a feature out of decades of behind-the-scenes footage from around the world—its fragmented moments of joy, anger, trauma and empathy reveal a common humanity even as they refuse to mark time and its deconstruction.
A young black woman in search of her white biological mother gives Leigh’s heartwrenching if occasionally amusing film the kind of narrative and thematic gravitas rarely experienced in such stories about families in crisis, featuring an all-timer performance by Brenda Blethyn.
