Erice’s allegorical work puts you in a trance-like spell with its picturesque cinematography and disquieting mood setting as a child is haunted by James Whale’s ‘Frankenstein’ in 1940s rural Spain.
Ichikawa’s marvellous coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games is one of the all-time finest sports documentaries, at times poetic and abstract, and always interested in the bodies, faces and movements of athletes and spectators rather than who wins or loses.
A breathtaking film to look at, this understated Venice Grand Jury Prize winner explores war and gender as a deserting soldier causes tension in a remote Italian commune hidden away in the mountains, and thus spared from the horrors of WWII.
Cronenberg’s critically derided work is a misunderstood if inscrutable piece about the nihilistic reassurance of death and mortality in a world careening towards rigor mortis.
The first of Kaurismaki’s ‘Proletariat’ trilogy is where it all crystallised very close to the fullest form and style of the Finnish director’s subsequent films as a garbage truck driver meets a supermarket cashier.
Structured around the Chinese wedding, baby shower and funeral, Yang’s final masterpiece dissects the relationships surrounding one extended middle-class family as life’s endless wisdoms grace and elude them.
Yang’s penultimate film could be his bleakest and most pointed attack on the corrupted soul of Taiwanese society—an angry, rough-hewn and surly escapade featuring lowly gangsters, prostitutes, scammers and rich exploiters of the common man.
Itami’s most famous film, a ramen Western, is unpredictable but electric, showing with deadpan humour how food penetrates every aspect of life.
Animated animals that finally don’t talk are the stars of this Latvian Oscar submission for Best International Feature, as a Noah’s Ark-type flood envelopes the world in this compelling and communal survival-adventure.
A narratological and tonal detour from his earlier output, Yang’s biting satire exposes the anxieties and hypocrisies of several young adults living in a modernising Taipei that has conditioned its people to celebrate the transactional and exploitative aspects of work, relationships and life.
Eternality Tan 