A down-to-earth and poignant drama about a female student who has a crush on her married male teacher facing a midlife crisis, featuring indelible performances from Jacky Cheung, Anita Mui, and a breakout role by Karena Lam.
Larrain imagines Pinochet as a still-alive vampire in this darkly comic if sometimes absurd take on tackling national historical trauma—it doesn’t work that convincingly but one can admire the conceptual vision.
A significant work of the Cinema Novo movement, one that dared to challenge the legitimacy of politics and religion as a poor farmer tries to seek salvation after killing his exploitative employer.
Technically exceptional but overlong and somewhat meandering, this Vietnamese Cannes Camera d’Or-winning work takes a leaf out of Weerasethakul’s slow cinema playbook, as a man must process and reflect on loss after an unexpected death in the family.
A tad overlong, but this coming-of-age, teen angst movie captures with exceptional ambition the pre-social media stan culture with a kind of authenticity, intimacy and raging fervour quite rarely experienced in cinema.
S&M aficionados, Nazi sympathizers and more adorn Seidl’s shocking if enlightening tableaux-esque documentary about the bewildering secrets and fetishes that transpire in the basements of Austrian residences.
Xenophobia is fought gallantly through empathy and solidarity with the marginalised as Syrian refugees find new homes in Northeast England, in Loach’s exceptional and emotionally-stirring swansong.
It does sometimes feel too stretched out with Kurosawa milking sentimentality out of its melancholy postwar drama, but the compelling characters take us somewhere meaningful as we ponder about what it means to be poor but in love.
The hopes of transcending their abject youth emanate from the trio of well-realised characters in Chen’s assured fourth feature, set and shot in far-flung Northeast China.
Tedious at times with an overbearing anti-Americanism, this was an experimental misstep by Antonioni who seemed to want to say a lot but achieved little in the process.
Eternality Tan 