The sea, by turns calm and angry, mirrors the hearts of the young protagonists, who must accept life’s vulnerabilities in Kawase’s poetic piece, shot largely on the southern Japanese island of Amami Oshima.
Meditative yet at times tonally dissonant, Liao’s work about the shifting temporalities of identity and memory is ultimately elusive.
Cote makes the monotony of industrial labour poetic and hypnotic in this decent documentary exploration of what ‘work’ and ‘working’ means to the blue-collar fraternity.
An aged activist is being charged with abetting suicide in this exceptional feature debut that explores class, society and politics through the absurdity of legality.
As a swords-and-sandals biblical epic, it is fairly spectacular, but remotely engaging.
While the storytelling sometimes struggles to convince, the technical prowess of Lou Ye’s team in capturing the extraordinary performances and putting together one mesmerizing and sensual image after another is deserving of praise.
An unconventional, mosaic-like, though not always engaging account of the last day of Pasolini’s life—capturing the values, ideals and artistry of a filmmaker who was also an ideological provocateur.
Petzold’s unique treatment of the doppelganger story as a Hitchcockian exercise in exorcising the Jewish-German trauma of WWII boasts an extraordinary denouement of unparalleled execution.
Football as cinema, if only barely, as the director and his father talk about the latter’s refereeing of the game, and by extension, Romania’s late ‘80s political history in this uneventful and uncompelling documentary.
An ethereal animated feature if there ever was one, Irish filmmaker Tomm Moore’s wondrous follow-up to The Secret of Kells is an antidote to the fast and furious world of Hollywood animation.
Eternality Tan 