Women bare their bodies and souls in this excellent intimate, inward-looking Estonian documentary set in a private smoke sauna.
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Women bare their bodies and souls in this excellent intimate, inward-looking Estonian documentary set in a private smoke sauna.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.

An extraordinary silent feature from Brazil set to a playlist of classical music, so unique, enigmatic and dreamlike that it still carves out new, profound possibilities for cinema.
A widow’s anxiety and frustration over a feisty inheritance tussle reflects entrenched patriarchal thinking in both domestic and legal arenas in this fine debut feature, which is also the first film from Jordan to compete at Cannes.
Antonioni brings his enigmatic style to striking locales around Europe and Africa in this tour de force work about identities and personas.
Suzuki’s middle entry of his arthouse ‘Taisho’ trilogy sees a playwright get bogged down by his own shifting realities, fictive or otherwise, spawning a spectral meta-theatrical experience that is largely inscrutable yet weirdly transfixing.
Violent, intense, darkly comic and a tour de force experience, this is God-tier Scorsese and one of the greatest films about gangsters and organised crime ever made.
A sweeping if unremarkable, ‘globe-trotting’ drama about a father who tries to locate his daughters after surviving the Armenian genocide of 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, with Faith Akin’s approach too conventional to really compel.
A vibey Moroccan music documentary about the popular group Nass-El Ghiwane that is a mix of invigorating performances, behind-the-scenes, and colonial history.
Triet’s highly-charged frenzy of a debut feature sees a female news reporter navigate rowdy crowds and an even rowdier family row, as her persistent ex-husband attempts to pay her little children a visit on the day of the 2012 French Presidential Election.