Hong’s finest film in a while tackles work, life, art, love, past and future with effortless ease, as an art lecturer asks his famous but blacklisted uncle to help her students mount a skit.
A beautifully animated French drama that focuses on the nuts and bolts of mountain scaling as a Japanese photojournalist hopes to find historical and existential clarity about the exploits of several mountain climbers.
Blending concert scenes, comedy and thriller modes, this is a largely rapturous dramatisation of the rise of the Belfast-based hip-hop group as they seek to reclaim the Irish language from the oppressive British authorities.
Structured around the Chinese wedding, baby shower and funeral, Yang’s final masterpiece dissects the relationships surrounding one extended middle-class family as life’s endless wisdoms grace and elude them.
Yang’s penultimate film could be his bleakest and most pointed attack on the corrupted soul of Taiwanese society—an angry, rough-hewn and surly escapade featuring lowly gangsters, prostitutes, scammers and rich exploiters of the common man.
A brilliant idea to set a ‘warring gangs’ action film in the iconic if long-demolished Kowloon Walled City, but this comic book adaptation feels numbingly empty with its stylistic excesses a tonal mismatch with the more sobering space of marginality and exploitation.
Itami’s most famous film, a ramen Western, is unpredictable but electric, showing with deadpan humour how food penetrates every aspect of life.
Animated animals that finally don’t talk are the stars of this Latvian Oscar submission for Best International Feature, as a Noah’s Ark-type flood envelopes the world in this compelling and communal survival-adventure.
A narratological and tonal detour from his earlier output, Yang’s biting satire exposes the anxieties and hypocrisies of several young adults living in a modernising Taipei that has conditioned its people to celebrate the transactional and exploitative aspects of work, relationships and life.
It may be mid-tier Ridley Scott with standard-fare storytelling, but this sequel is boosted by Denzel Washington’s scene-stealing supporting role and a gleefully gorier treatment of violent spectacle.
Eternality Tan 