Stanley Kwan’s gay drama, set in 1980s Beijing, feels more impressionistic than a deeply-felt journey with its characters, though the performances are compelling enough to overcome its rather lean narrative.
As per tradition after the Oscars, I will give out imaginary awards to the films that I love most or hold in high regard from the preceding year.
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It goes through its storytelling beats without fuss but also without invention, though all that becomes insignificant when you are in the cockpit of a fighter jet in what could be the most immersive blockbuster to be shot aerially since Dunkirk.
Joachim Trier’s debut feature is still his most striking work—a youthful, frenetic immersion into the intellectual and emotional psyches of two best friends who hope for a big break as authors.
It’s not easy to do a documentary about the life and work of arguably the world’s most extraordinary film composer, but Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore just about makes it work as it captures the sheer breadth and range of the maestro’s legacy.
A naïve teenage girl gives birth but her wily mother has other sinister ideas in this well-directed Mexican drama that is not afraid to go down a morally contentious path.
This could be Pasolini’s most oblique work—a diptych that examines the nature of latent fascism and fetishistic consumption through the symbolism of cannibalism and the erasure of bodily traces.
This finely-tuned Berlinale Golden Bear winner recalls the spirit of Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, showcasing a close-knitted inter-generational Spanish family of peach farmers who face the threat of eviction from their land.
A below-par effort by one of Israel’s established directors whose somewhat controversial film about a family trapped by a military lockdown of an Arab town in Israel has a great premise but suffers from an uninteresting execution.
Loznitsa expertly puts footage together from Leningrad in August 1991 as tens of thousands of nervous Russians filled the streets, with the political fate of their country hanging in the balance after communist hardliners staged what would become a failed coup d’état to revive the collapsing Soviet Union.
Eternality Tan 