A family patriarch is convinced after a night’s dream that his daughter-in-law is the incarnation of the Goddess Kali, in Ray’s quietly devastating attack on religious dogma, with 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore’s haunting gaze at the center of a tug-of-war between blind faith and rationalism.
Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
Oshima’s WWII anti-war melodrama feels more like theatre than cinema, as the quartet of compelling actors (Bowie, Sakamoto, Conti, and Kitano), queer undercurrents, and a highly emotional epilogue elevate it into something unexpectedly sublime.
A fervent, playful self-portrait that sees a bubbly yet wistful Varda at her most inventive, crafting a near-formless cinematic salute that reimagines what personal documentary filmmaking can be.
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
A quietly defiant and unconventional anti-war film, Melville turns passivity into resistance, using repetition, silence, and minute gestures to probe the human soul, as a highly-cultured Nazi officer installs himself in the home of an old Frenchman and his niece.
One of Kaurismaki’s funniest and most fascinating deviations in his oeuvre, this East Goes West road movie sutures music, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and deadpan humour into a pseudo-documentary, crowned by arguably the best hairstyle ever committed to celluloid.
The fearless and admirable Laura Poitras weaves the traumatic personal history, artistic legacy, and near-fatal overdose of Nan Goldin into a formally inventive documentary that urgently reveals the power of transformative social justice.
A nuanced, layered, and finely acted work about art, memory, and fractured familial bonds, Trier’s latest is quietly absorbing and emotionally intelligent, centering on an absent father who is a famous auteur hoping to get his elder daughter to star in his new, personal film.
A ‘revelatory’ work in more ways than one, Dogme 95’s first official entry sees Vinterberg masterfully throwing us into the deep end of dark secrets and hard truths, as a reunion of family and friends celebrating the 60th birthday of a patriarch turns into a moral catastrophe.
Eternality Tan 