It’s hard to find a debut feature this dreamy and evocative, as Dash lends historical voice to her people—the generations of Gullahs who lived on the South Carolina Sea Islands as they endured slavery and faced a modernising 20th century.
A sensitively-drawn debut feature about a trans-child who must navigate burgeoning notions of gender identity amid confusing signals sent by her family, shot in a naturalistic style befitting the very nature of self-discovery.
This could be Nolan’s greatest achievement so far—a stunning biopic imagined as a complex, time-ticking paranoia thriller as the sheer burden of scientific progress meets the retroactive traumatic weight of 20th-century history.
Perhaps too slight to really work at the level that the Thai auteur usually operates, but there are moments that invite us to ponder about the ephemeral nature of life as a trio of characters pass their time at a hotel by the river.
Visually stunning that is reminiscent of Kurosawa and Tarkovsky, this Kazakh New Wave film treats the theme of vengeance as a long-gestating circle of life and death, efficiently and poetically told in a series of chapters.
A French computer programmer attempts to create a game about WWII’s Battle of Okinawa but faces an existential crisis when history, memory and trauma become mediated by the throes of technological change in this spectral final feature documentary from one of cinema’s foremost experimenters.
Fun, wacky and occasionally surprising, Gerwig’s candy-coloured third solo feature tries to say something about the perils of gender oppression and excessive commodification with moderate success.
Intentionally shot out of focus, Hong’s impressionistic and ‘painterly’ new work about an actor-turned-director in search of an idea to shoot a short film doesn’t always work, but its meta-filmic final act is sublime.
Shot entirely on a soundstage in France, this Cannes Camera d’Or-winner put Vietnamese cinema on the world map, as Tran straddled between formal artistry and the artifice of cultural self-exotification in this quaint film about a quiet servant-girl working for an affluent family.
Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love steal the show in this entertaining textbook biopic on the infamous multi-millionaire publisher of pornographic magazines who fought valiantly against the religious right for the freedom of expression.
Eternality Tan 