Beguiling if also bewildering, this newly-restored pre-’79 Iranian rarity is ultimately elusive and muddling in its thematic exploration of paranoia, traditions and taboos, as a mysterious wounded man drifts ashore on a boat.
One of the most chillingly unique Holocaust films in decades, Glazer’s cold and calculated take on human complicity in enabling atrocities is told from the perspective of a high-ranking Nazi officer raising his family in a luxurious compound built right next to a concentration camp in Auschwitz.
One of Tarr’s best-known works as a quiet Hungarian town experiences an unprecedented disruption when a mysterious attraction arrives, in what appears to be a potent political and moral allegory on the evil that lurks within peoples and systems.
Tong’s long-gestating new film is a work of poise, as much a lament for the ‘lost’ Chinese-educated generation who found difficulty existing in English-prioritised Singapore in the late ‘70s, as it is a pining for simpler times and simpler truths.
Freewheeling if repetitive, Rivette’s anti-thriller feels much emptier than usual as a woman’s sister and an ex-lover are asked to join her in mysterious circumstances.
This slow-burner suspense classic, and one of Melville’s most influential works, is an excellent character study of the ‘hitman’.
Ben Hania’s new work is a documentary of performative reenactments as actors and real-life subjects break the borders of reality in a bid to confront traumatic memories of a family permanently altered by religious radicalisation.
One of Russell’s top-tier films, this sensual adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel takes both lofty and earthy notions of ‘love’ into an ever-deepening spiral of psychosexual complications and provocations.
Still as enchanting and imaginative as ever, even if Miyazaki’s work had to overcome some pacing issues and an anything-goes narrative.
A young Polish man living with his dying mother harbours dreams of scaling the Himalayas but has to face rampant corruption at his workplace in Zanussi’s character study of a person caught in the two worlds of morality and mortality.
Eternality Tan 