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.
Arguably the artistic pinnacle of Zeman’s career, this endlessly creative work featuring an eclectic range of visual effect techniques sees the titular hero serenade us with his grand, incredulous adventures.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
With incredible abandon and ambition, Coppola’s work, infused with Roman allegory, is staggering in terms of craft despite its rather clunky storytelling, as a time-controlling architect hopes to rebuild a new utopian city that is future-looking.
Panahi’s fourth feature since his house arrest is familiar in terms of his usual mode of cinematic address, but this time he paints a desolate picture of patriarchy rearing its ugly head amid some quiet moments of poetic beauty.
An unsurprisingly quaint coda to Sokurov’s extraordinary career, as archive footage is combined with deepfake technology, resurrecting Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Churchill as spectral artefacts in a liminal, purgatorial space between death and death.
