A cult horror classic from early 1930s Hollywood with visual effects work that remains mind-boggling today, as an experiment gone wrong causes an increasingly erratic scientist to become invisible and immensely powerful.
A professional killer implicated deep within an organised crime syndicate waits to be activated in Morita’s impressive mood piece of a character study, methodically conceived and featuring a denouement as shocking as any in ‘80s Japanese cinema.
Themes of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirl intensely in this decent offering starring the Berlinale award-winning Sebastian Stan, who plays a disfigured man who begins to morph into a normal-looking person after an experimental clinical trial.
A migrant cyborg is sent out into the world to record moving images of random human encounters in Tsangari’s rather prescient if sometimes incoherent debut feature that distils the sense of obliviousness to the new anxieties at the turn of the millennium.
Huppert returns in front of Hong’s camera for the third time in this largely breezy drama about ‘learning’, ‘feeling’ and ‘sipping’ as a French woman uses an unorthodox method to teach French to several Koreans in their encounters with music or poetry.
Tsui’s Hong Kong action-fantasy cult classic is a reminder that the ‘visibility’ of VFX can be a virtue, with its retrogradely charming effects distracting from its nonsensical story of super-warriors fighting against an evil force.
Morita’s creatively-shot and accomplished breakthrough film sees a tutor-outsider embrace and disrupt the status quo of a middle-class family with an underachieving child, with thought-provoking results.
Yang’s complex, metaphysical tale of intersecting narratives continues his fascination with urban relationships—of people and spaces—in this competently-constructed stunner.
The third entry in Seidl’s trilogy may be the least provocative but it is surprisingly one of his more embracing films as a teenage girl becomes infatuated with a much older doctor at her dieting camp.
Yang’s outstanding second feature is a slow and methodical look at romance and conflict set against the modernisation of Taiwan.
Eternality Tan 