A brilliant idea to set a ‘warring gangs’ action film in the iconic if long-demolished Kowloon Walled City, but this comic book adaptation feels numbingly empty with its stylistic excesses a tonal mismatch with the more sobering space of marginality and exploitation.
Rankin’s sophomore feature feels like Kaurismaki meets Kiarostami as his surreal, and at times perplexing tale brings us through a hybrid Canadian-Iranian space marked by quaint shophouses and bustling highways.
Still needs another much tighter recut, this now unbanned Thai film about a cult of dog-worshipping fanatics is at times intolerable with its B-movie vibe though it unexpectedly turns into something revelatory about the meaning of ‘God’.
As highly personal a documentary as it gets about seeking for truth and justice, featuring the derring-do of the journalist-director who was sexually assaulted by a powerful man many years ago as she painstakingly attempts to put the demon to the sword.
Minervini’s work about the real America i.e. the disturbia of the working-class provokes with its sheer no-bullshit honesty, with an invisible camera that gives zero distinction between drama and documentary.
While sometimes too overreliant on its non-linear storytelling, this serviceable rehabilitation drama boasts stunning scenes of the Orkney Islands, as Saoirse Ronan captures all of the fury and sensitivity of her character trying to liberate herself from alcoholism.
A cult horror classic from early 1930s Hollywood with visual effects work that remains mind-boggling today, as an experiment gone wrong causes an increasingly erratic scientist to become invisible and immensely powerful.
Themes of ‘identity’ and ‘role-playing’ swirl intensely in this decent offering starring the Berlinale award-winning Sebastian Stan, who plays a disfigured man who begins to morph into a normal-looking person after an experimental clinical trial.
A migrant cyborg is sent out into the world to record moving images of random human encounters in Tsangari’s rather prescient if sometimes incoherent debut feature that distils the sense of obliviousness to the new anxieties at the turn of the millennium.
An unsurprisingly quaint coda to Sokurov’s extraordinary career, as archive footage is combined with deepfake technology, resurrecting Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Churchill as spectral artefacts in a liminal, purgatorial space between death and death.
Eternality Tan 