A revelatory feature debut by Ghobadi, whose work with child actors and eye for natural landscapes is remarkable, telling a story of perseverance amid desperation set near the porous if dangerous Iran-Iraq border.
Glazer’s stylish feature debut is quite sensational—a hilariously tense showdown between a laidback Ray Winstone and a foul-mouthed Ben Kingsley, the latter hoping to recruit the former, a ‘retired’ safecracker, for a final heist.
Soderbergh is at his commanding best in this powerful and unsettling film that captures the essence of the U.S-Mexico drug trade as it is, and without the need to moralise.
A David versus Goliath true story done right by Soderbergh, featuring two outstanding performances from Julia Roberts and Albert Finney.
A stunning return to form by Ridley Scott, who revived the swords-and-sandals movie in the 2000s.
A woman’s husband disappears in Ozon’s psychological drama about grief and denial, starring Charlotte Rampling in one of her finest performances.
A talking fish on the chopping board partly narrates this interesting if weird non-linearly-structured sophomore feature by Villeneuve that is tonally all over the place, as it explores how cosmic connections mediate between actions and consequences.
Lou Ye’s breakthrough is a risqué-lite affair, shot in a gritty, disjointed style that pays homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
A teenage girl and her parents who are far-left terrorists on the run are the focus of this promising and largely riveting feature debut that combines coming-of-age tropes with crime and politics, while at the same time turning some of these conventions upside-down.
This is Haneke in peak form—made up of more than forty vignettes shot in long takes that combine to give us a fragmentary sense of what it feels like to live in a multi-racial yet racist, technological yet incommunicable post-2000s world.
Eternality Tan 