‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.

‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.

The anxiety of opening one’s heart to another marks this underrated Miyazaki effort about a WWI pilot cursed to look like a pig—it could be his funniest film, yet the enveloping sense of nostalgia and memory makes us yearn for a past that we have never known.
A family consisting of four generations of Palestinian women is the subject of this highly personal documentary that sheds an affirmative light on stories of displacement—from their lands and themselves.
Awards season is right up the corner – here are my predictions for the Golden Globes 2024:
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 11/15 (15/15 with dark horses)
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A seminal work of ‘60s Turkish cinema, Akad’s neorealist Western features the legendary Yilmaz Guney whose character finds himself at the crossroads between social progress and lawlessness.
Kaurismaki’s style remains unmistakable, but this isn’t a particularly edifying effort as two affection-shy strangers elusively seek romance and companionship in lonely Helsinki.
An Austrian woman goes to Kenya in search of intimacy and connection as Seidl, in his usual provocative mode, explores ‘sex tourism’ as both a curse and an antidote to sheer human loneliness.
Lanthimos delivers arguably his finest film to date with this erotic surrealist odyssey featuring Emma Stone in a truly stunning performance as a woman brought back to life by an eccentric scientist.
Kaurismaki’s confident first solo feature already contains the hallmarks of his sober, deadpan style, in the guise of a loose adaptation of Dostoevsky’s famous text.
Bursts of warped creativity punctuate this rather inscrutable Singaporean experimental drama about the discomfiting nature of personal fantasies and quiet acceptance in matters of life and death.