Almodovar’s Stockholm syndrome drama will probably be cancelled if made today, but while it isn’t a home run by his provocative standards, it features two impressionable performances by Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril.
Exciting yet elusive, violent yet convoluted, this Locarno Golden Leopard winner is a strange beast of ideas, tropes and moods.
The specificity of its cultural context just about lifts this nuanced Indonesian drama about a high school girl torn between the custom of accepting marriage proposals and her dreams of further studies.
This WWII thriller is a return to form for Verhoeven after his hit-and-miss Hollywood journey, featuring an exceptional performance by Carice van Houten as a Jewish singer who attempts to infiltrate the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
It’s well-made, but underwhelmingly conventional and perhaps too prim and proper to suggest that it has any real interest in diving deeper into the dirty sociopolitics of the time, settling unfortunately for a more sanitised, autobiographical Oscar-baiting family picture.
Spielberg’s biopic about one of America’s most notoriously successful conmen might seem like a breezy affair with largely captivating performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and Christopher Walken, but it does overstay its welcome at some point.
Rich characterisations adorn this talky slice-of-life drama from Ann Hui as it tackles love-hate family dynamics and dementia with bittersweet results.
Possibly Keaton’s best-known work, this silent comedy about a railroad engineer desperate to recover his stolen locomotive behind enemy lines during the American Civil War features some of the medium’s most inventive action scenes with trains.
As zany a film as you can find in Indian Parallel Cinema, Sen’s work about an uncompassionate city bureaucrat who goes on a perspective-changing hunting trip is highly-expressive in form and film language.
It may sometimes feel protracted, but Korda’s bleak work about a black priest who tries to locate his estranged son in Johannesburg (shot on location) shows the fatalistic implications of apartheid at the personal level.
