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.
Triet’s third feature suffers somewhat from haphazard editing as it tells a fragmentary story about a psychotherapist who finds renewed motivation as a writer as she becomes embroiled in the affairs of an aspiring actress.
Glazer’s fascinating third feature is nothing like we have ever seen—a deliberately-paced tale of an ‘alien’ on Earth (precisely Scotland) in female form who seduces men to their doom.
This superb sophomore feature from one of the finest Mexican filmmakers working today is infectious with its artistry as it tells of two men who robbed a famous museum in Mexico City in 1985.
A Ukrainian woman travels to Austria while an Austrian man travels to Ukraine for work in what could be Seidl’s finest hour as a filmmaker—this is an extraordinary ultra-realist drama about the human costs of being dispensable in the East-West European economic flows.
Explicit unsimulated sex as an attraction aside, this is probably Noe’s worst film—too meandering, overlong and built around an annoying ‘inner thoughts’ voiceover that quickly becomes tiresome.
An anti-thriller almost, in this assured film of two distinct halves about a vengeful criminal, an exploited prostitute, and a guilt-ridden policeman who all become implicated in life’s luck of the draw.
