Realism without filters, Chernov’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning ’20 Days in Mariupol’ is a devastating war vérité that strips conflict of rhetoric, leaving only attrition, absurdity, and the unbearable weight of patriotic labour carried by ordinary Ukrainian men.
Unadorned in form yet uncompromising in purpose, Jacir’s invigorating new work about the late ‘30s Arab revolt in Palestine shows that power lies in the clarity with which one reframes both past injustice and present responsibility.
A urologist and her gay male nurse are non-committal in their pursuit of relationships with others, but their array of experiences challenges their worldviews on love, sex and the ‘morality’ of values, in this outstanding middle entry of Haugerud’s loose thematic ‘Oslo’ trilogy.
Swinton’s sublime gender-fluid performance is one for the ages (well, quite literally), giving Potter’s one-of-a-kind adaptation of the unfilmable Virginia Woolf novel its consistent anchor, as it explores the human mind’s preoccupation with both existential and corporeal torments and pleasures.
A father, with son in tow, follows a group of ravers to find his missing daughter in the dusty desert of North Africa, in Laxe’s stunning, foreboding road movie about faith and despair, marked by thumping beats, shuffling bodies, and bellowing trucks.
Winner of Best Director at the Berlinale, this assured work about growing up in a Chinese village in 1991 as the winds of modernity begin to change lives, reminds one of a cross between Zhang Yimou’s early rural dramas and Yang’s Yi Yi.
A French organic farming couple doesn’t want to sell their land to a wind turbine eco-company, incurring the wrath of the Spanish locals, as Sorogoyen’s slow-burning thriller reveals the psychological pressures of intimidation and violence.
This Berlinale Golden Bear winner is one of the best films of 2025, exploring how a teenage girl’s crush on her teacher sparks questions about literary catharsis and ownership of private feelings, as she mulls over publishing her sacred experiences of ‘love’.
Enyedi’s dreamlike debut feature has a fabulist tone, though its thematic exploration of political and technological developments in modern human history never comes into full realisation, as the film charts the lives of a pair of orphaned twins who go their separate ways.
This is a powerful confrontation of the religious irony, corruption and injustice at play in the Dominican Republic, as a devout Evangelical Christian man returning home for his murdered father’s funeral must tolerate paganistic rituals and his family’s call for ‘moral’ revenge.
Eternality Tan 