A couple’s marriage slowly disintegrates as war draws closer in this measuredly-paced drama set in the context of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over separatist-controlled Eastern Ukraine.
The formal rigour of its aesthetics and its slow cinema approach are at times haunting, capturing the traces of presence, disappearance and trauma in Mexico’s crime-infested rural areas, though it ultimately feels like an elusive experience without any inkling of a plot to hold on to.
It’s probably one of the most visually stunning films from the ‘90s with incredible production design and cinematography, but it can be difficult to care for its fractured story or the array of eccentric characters.
Could have been a definitive samurai picture if it wasn’t too exposition heavy, but still quite a solid entry by Okamoto-Mifune.
A beloved Classical Hollywood tearjerker as love and fate intertwine in this melodrama directed with unassuming grace by Leo McCarey.
This politically stirring and at times truly heartbreaking Golden Horse-winning documentary gives us that intense journalistic, on the ground experience of the 2019 Hong Kong protests from start to end.
Animated documentaries may be few and far between, but this is an affecting work that skilfully details an Afghan refugee’s harrowing life story fleeing from war and conflict, and more introspectively, from himself.
Exciting yet elusive, violent yet convoluted, this Locarno Golden Leopard winner is a strange beast of ideas, tropes and moods.
The specificity of its cultural context just about lifts this nuanced Indonesian drama about a high school girl torn between the custom of accepting marriage proposals and her dreams of further studies.
It’s well-made, but underwhelmingly conventional and perhaps too prim and proper to suggest that it has any real interest in diving deeper into the dirty sociopolitics of the time, settling unfortunately for a more sanitised, autobiographical Oscar-baiting family picture.
Eternality Tan 