Somai’s tender and transformative masterwork, about a child grappling with her parents’ divorce, boasts an extraordinary acting debut by Tomoko Tabata, capturing the emotional, physical and psychological aspects of separation with such empathy.
Beers, drugs, hazing rituals, and unchecked rebelliousness mark the last day of high school circa May 1976, Texas, as Linklater expertly drops us in the middle of the chaos, with a killer rock soundtrack to boot.
A terrifically entertaining movie that sees Tsui Hark utilising all manner of dizzying cinematography, creative editing and special effects to deliver a manic piece of action-fantasy cinema about two seductive snake demons who transform into humans.
One of the greatest films of all time, Spielberg’s masterstroke was projecting narrative uncertainties against an acute sense of historical certainty that was the Holocaust, resulting in a work that is harrowingly tense but also imbued with moments of cathartic empathy.
Scorsese’s criminally ignored work based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is exquisite and expressive, as the psychological violence of complicated romances and illicit affairs threaten to implode in the cloistered high society of New York’s ‘Gilded Age’.
Shot entirely on a soundstage in France, this Cannes Camera d’Or-winner put Vietnamese cinema on the world map, as Tran straddled between formal artistry and the artifice of cultural self-exotification in this quaint film about a quiet servant-girl working for an affluent family.
To deliberately takes B-movie action preposterousness to wildly delirious levels in this work of inventive imagination and delightful campiness.
Soderbergh’s first studio effort is rich in its ‘30s Depression-era period detail, while also functioning as a coming-of-age tale with an unexpected touch of warmth.
Rosi’s eye-opening first-ever documentary could be his finest—he plants his camera on a boat along the holy Ganges River, capturing the assortment of sights, sounds and fervent opinions, as it meditates on the cycles of life and death.
This is one of Rohmer’s more styleless films, though it is inherently more political than most of his output as he intellectualises the nature of political ecology, which may occasionally if unexpectedly come across as a tad dry.
Eternality Tan 