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.
A great non-Bruce Lee entry point to the kung fu craze of the early ‘70s, this is fundamental viewing for fans of HK martial arts movies as Lo Lieh stars as a young man who becomes embroiled in a hostile school rivalry that turns increasingly brutal.
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.
Eternality Tan 