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.
Possibly Keaton’s best-known work, this silent comedy about a railroad engineer desperate to recover his stolen locomotive behind enemy lines during the American Civil War features some of the medium’s most inventive action scenes with trains.
It may sometimes feel protracted, but Korda’s bleak work about a black priest who tries to locate his estranged son in Johannesburg (shot on location) shows the fatalistic implications of apartheid at the personal level.
A gentle, heartfelt and beautifully-shot piece about why movies inspire us, from the point-of-view of an inquisitive village boy who befriends a 35mm film projectionist.
Although not exactly emotionally resonant, Joel Coen’s adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s seminal texts is as dark and brooding as they come, a unique balance of theatrical artifice and cinematic vision.
Any film about the Holocaust is always essential viewing—this Oscar-winning documentary details the testimonies of five Hungarian Jews who survived the concentration camps during the time when the Nazis brutally intensified their extermination plan despite knowing they were losing the war.
An extraordinary work of hard-hitting social realism that recalls the Dardennes’ ‘Rosetta’ and Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, set in the harsh wintry conditions of Moscow as a young Kyrgyz woman abandons her baby to find work to pay off insurmountable debts.
Stillman’s accomplished comedy (his debut feature) tackles a particular class milieu in America—what the young, well-to-do Manhattanites deem as ‘urban haute bourgeoisie’—with a wry and sardonic tone that is uniquely his.
Inspired by Kiarostami’s ‘Taste of Cherry‘, this standout American indie about a young effervescent Senegalese taxi driver befriending a suicidal old man features two extraordinary, emotionally affecting performances from Souleymane Sy Savane and Red West.
Eternality Tan 