A dress rehearsal for what would come later, this captivating early effort may be thought of as Miyazaki’s ‘Dune’—a fantasy epic with warring nations, a mythic prophecy and giant insects that also operates as a potent call to prevent the mother of all ecological disasters.
The iconic duo return in another rollickingly amusing adventure as they must clear their name after being framed for crimes they didn’t commit, rendered in the tactile, almost corporeal stop-motion quality that Aardman has been reliably producing for decades.
This Swiss drama shares a similar spirit with the breezy films of ‘60s French New Wave as an exceptional Bulle Ogier plays an enigmatic woman who is the subject of two writers in this thought-provoking work about what it means to construct a person(a) through fact and fiction.
The gun of a high-ranking civil servant seems to have vanished in his home, as tensions heighten within his family (and outside in the streets of Tehran caused by the Mahsa Amini protests) in Rasoulof’s devastating but also galvanising work about the elusiveness of truth and the abuse of power.
Containing the hallmarks of great sci-fi fantasy movies, this enthralling but underseen animation from the ‘Fantastic Planet’ director, with art stylings from Mœbius, gives us intergalactic, mind-bending travel, as an urgent rescue crew attempts to reach a boy stranded on a hostile planet.
Sweeping, intimate and emotional, Salles returns to form with his first fiction feature in 12 years as a close-knit family is irreversibly impacted by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the early 1970s.
Ichikawa’s marvellous coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games is one of the all-time finest sports documentaries, at times poetic and abstract, and always interested in the bodies, faces and movements of athletes and spectators rather than who wins or loses.
A breathtaking film to look at, this understated Venice Grand Jury Prize winner explores war and gender as a deserting soldier causes tension in a remote Italian commune hidden away in the mountains, and thus spared from the horrors of WWII.
This Panahi-Kiarostami collab is an edgier though not always engaging part-‘thriller’, part-social critique about personal humiliation and vendetta as a delivery man is constantly reminded of his working-class status.
Powerful when it needs to be, this humanist drama centers not on politics but the tragedies that befall children caught in the midst of war.
Eternality Tan 