A Brazilian feature debut to savour, from the weathered beauty of rural villages to compelling performances by the cast as an Argentinian drug kingpin seeks refuge in the home of a family, causing tensions to simmer.
A Korean adopted by a French couple when she was a baby returns to Korea for the first time as a French woman in Davy Chou’s intimate if chastening third feature, backed by an excellent performance from Park Ji-min in her acting debut.
Difficult to enjoy and too reliant on its theatrical artifice for three overlong hours, this esoteric and inscrutable drama tackles China’s 20th-century history through the memories of a dead theatre troupe member ready to enter the afterlife.
This deliberately-paced and quietly introspective Croatian drama is bleak yet also an utterly personal and intimate look at the topic of suicide, opening the possibility for grief to gurgle to the surface as art tries to heal by the side.
A man in severe debt refuses to sell his family mansion in this deliberately-paced Sri Lankan film that deals with the inner turmoil of a person caught between misguided superstition and the prospect of personal redemption.
Eco-‘terrorism’ is explored in this tense and pulsating thriller about a group of environmental activists planning to bomb an oil pipeline in Texas as they try to find a precarious balance between agency and morality.
Visionary in the worst possible way, Folman’s live-action/animation hybrid packs in so many ideas about time, legacy and existence that it all seems so muddled, uneven and uninvolving.
It will surely spark more conversations on women’s agency in dealing with sexual assault and toxic masculinity, but Polley’s work is visually uninteresting, and the performances might sometimes feel maudlin.
This could very well be the first-ever Holocaust drama, about a group of resilient women who must attempt to survive during the last months of the war, startlingly shot on location at Auschwitz, with many cast and crew who survived the concentration camps.
We haven’t had a great anti-war film in years—this WWI piece comes just as timely in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is as technically accomplished and emotionally involving as some of the finest entries of the genre.
