Wang Bing adopts his observational documentary style for this rare if not always compelling dramatisation of Mao’s labour camps in the Gobi Desert, as countless starving men faced an unending sense of bleakness, futility and toil.
A crafty businessman with a death wish concocts a shady scheme in Anderson’s new work that seems to have diminishing returns, though backed by strong performances from Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera.
Wong’s rather conventional debut feature is a ‘Mean Streets’-esque gangster thriller that provides cursory pleasures with the odd heady rush of romance, and backed by a trio of committed performances from Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung and Jacky Cheung.
Absorbing, hilarious and fun, Miyazaki’s feature debut is solid in terms of storytelling and is flat-out entertaining, leveraging on the popular exploits of master thief, Lupin the Third.
This terrific Iraq War picture is as anti-war as it gets, adopting a pure, minimalist aesthetic but operating with a maximalist Oscar-worthy sound design, as several soldiers holed up in enemy territory await support and rescue.
A small-town doctor embarks on a journey to find his nephew in Bi Gan’s formidable meditation on time and memory, where the director functions as a medium in which his alchemistic ways reveal moments of pure symbolic and poetic wonder.
The unsaid and the silences ring deafeningly in this Brazilian drama set in an island community, where generations of women have endured sexual abuse and exploitation, but one maturing teenager becomes cognizant of her fate.
Bigelow’s muscular film overcomes a very info-dense first half with an extremely riveting and tense second half, chronicling the decades-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Three men learn the bloodiest lesson ever from a rightfully vengeful woman in Fargeat’s stylish and gleefully exploitative first feature, a lean and mean modern throwback to the New French Extremity movement.
Two female teens hope to seek better opportunities in the body-violating world of modelling in this raw if measured Locarno Golden Leopard winner with strong echoes of Ulrich Seidl and Andrea Arnold.
Eternality Tan 