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.
A meaningful social initiative to connect young daughters with their incarcerated fathers is the subject of this rewarding Sundance award-winning documentary that might be one of the most moving films of the year.
Way too stilted and spiritless performances mar Schoenbrun’s aesthetically ‘flamboyant’ but ultimately vacant feature about gender and mediated identities, as two teenage social misfits find a human connection over a long-running television show that mysteriously gets cancelled.
An unclassifiable but whimsically rewarding anti-neocolonialist travelogue that sees the director turn the camera onto himself as he leaves his poor village and discovers how ridiculously modern the Western world is.
Trials and tribulations beset a Taiwanese family of four in Chung Mong-hong’s intimate and grounded work, one that is blessed with exceptional performances throughout.
Eternality Tan 