An orphaned brother and sister are separated by child social services in Adam Elliot’s life-affirming if darkly amusing stop-motion animated Australia, where misfits, weirdos and religious fanatics reside.
A mix of avant-garde Godard and topographical Rivette, but wholly Oshima in this occasionally ponderous meta-filmic and self-reflexive take on what it means to engage politically with filmmaking as a character leaves a mysterious final reel of film after committing suicide.
A work fundamentally rooted in voyeurism and the invasion of personal space in private and in public, Yeo’s part-mystery, part anti-thriller teases us with its form and structure as a young couple tries to find their missing child who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Awards season is right up the corner – here are my predictions for the Golden Globes 2025:
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 7/15 (12/15 with dark horses)
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Nondescript and mundane at times, this Oscar-nominated documentary about the black community in Alabama transforms somewhat into a more interesting, free-association piece though it isn’t quite the resoundingly meaningful work of observational, diaristic cinema it thinks it is.
Cronenberg’s critically derided work is a misunderstood if inscrutable piece about the nihilistic reassurance of death and mortality in a world careening towards rigor mortis.
Lau’s action extravaganza pits Chinese and Japanese martial arts against each other in a quest for legitimacy and personal dignity, disguised as an amusing marital conflict drama between a Chinese man and a Japanese woman.
Ralph Fiennes is exceptional as a cardinal who must oversee the selection of a new Pope as skeletons in the closet threaten to derail the voting process, in Berger’s taut ‘mystery-thriller’ that some might feel too highly calibrated in its storytelling.
The first of Kaurismaki’s ‘Proletariat’ trilogy is where it all crystallised very close to the fullest form and style of the Finnish director’s subsequent films as a garbage truck driver meets a supermarket cashier.
Eternality Tan 