This intense Turkish Berlinale Golden Bear winner, with one of the most sickening lead characters in world cinema, is about the blatant abuse of self-imposed power, as a greedy man builds dams to stop water from irrigating the lands of his neighbours.
Complex, abstract and utterly existential, Resnais’ first feature in colour deals with the past, present and future as battlegrounds of half-truths, and edited in a fragmented ‘shards-like’ style, as a woman’s ex-lover pays her a visit.
A triple-crossing crime actioner from master studio craftsman Suzuki that sharpened the critical focus on his thrilling devil-may-care filmmaking style.
A small-town priest must contend with the silence of God as he is overwhelmed with existential doubts in one of Bergman’s sparest works about the limits of religious faith.
Black sardonic humour abounds in this tale about the farce of capital punishment when a man is forced to marry an executioner’s daughter and has to become one himself in order to keep the apartment allotted by the state.
As much a cultural touchstone as it is an exemplar of the Huangmei opera genre, this classic of classics sucks you into its overt melodramatism and a heartrending story of everlasting love as a woman dressed as a man in order to attend university meets another man.
The Czech New Wave makes a rare foray into sci-fi in this well-made work from the ’60s dealing with the existential perils of space exploration and the unknown.
This is every bit how you might imagine Godard making an anti-war film would look and feel like—it’s darkly comic, blistering in its attack on warmongers and a fairly underrated work of his early phase.
A standout British film from the ‘60s, this hypnotic take on class and sex with tantalising bits of latent homosexuality, sees director Joseph Losey, writer Harold Pinter and actor Dirk Bogarde at the top of their game.
Chytilova’s strong, effortless feature debut blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, featuring two women—a restless housewife in an extramarital affair and Eva Bosakova, one of Czechoslovakia’s most famous Olympic gymnasts.
Eternality Tan 