Wang Bing adopts his observational documentary style for this rare if not always compelling dramatisation of Mao’s labour camps in the Gobi Desert, as countless starving men faced an unending sense of bleakness, futility and toil.
Seduction and intimacy seem to be desirable and repulsive at the same time in this key work of the Greek Weird Wave as the greyish, emotionless world of a young woman and her dying father is depicted with eccentricity.
A departure from his earlier ‘hyperlink’ films, Inarritu’s soul-searching work features Cannes Best Actor winner Javier Bardem, as a story about one man’s relationship with his community, family and existential self unfolds rewardingly.
Lee Chang-dong’s Cannes Best Screenplay winner teaches us to be at peace with ourselves no matter how dark things might become, as an old lady suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s turns to poetry writing for psychological comfort.
In Schanelec’s under-appreciated slow cinema oeuvre, this could be one of her ‘noisiest’ and most perceptive works as we become privy to the intimate conversations of several groups of strangers who are waiting to depart at the busy Paris-Orly airport.
Kechiche’s work about the real-life 19th-century racial and sexual exploitation of an African woman as an ethnic curiosity is bound to offend, but it is solid as a biopic that tackles the inherent voyeurism of the colonial gaze.
Eighteen persons with personal connections to the political, social and cultural history of Shanghai share their recollections in Jia Zhangke’s somewhat stolid documentary, where the sum feels lesser than its parts.
Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, this Chadian film packs plenty of unsaid emotions of jealousy, guilt and remorse into a nuanced father-and-son story as armed separatists threaten the peace of their country in the background.
A “Gladiator-ised” Robin Hood without the right punch in this missed opportunity by Ridley Scott.
One of Hong’s longest films but certainly one of his finest as two friends share over drinks the bittersweet details of their own separate trips to the seaside town of Tongyeong, as the uncertainties of love and conflict control the narrativisation of their memories.
Eternality Tan 