A sentient buffalo, a foolish servant sent across time and a shepherd whose days are numbered become mythical figures in Marcello’s magical realist docu-tale that features ravishing images of bucolic Italy, though the film rarely resonates in a deeper way than imagined.
An excellent Charlotte Rampling plays one half of a couple who have been together for more than four decades as they face a marital crisis that might prove to be insurmountable in Haigh’s delicate take on the meaning of love as refracted by secrets from the distant past.
Unfairly derided, Mann’s work here might not have come close to his best, but it’s still an intriguing 21st-century cyber-thriller set largely in Asia that deals with themes of geopolitics, technological fears, and agency versus anonymity in the digital world.
Loznitsa expertly puts footage together from Leningrad in August 1991 as tens of thousands of nervous Russians filled the streets, with the political fate of their country hanging in the balance after communist hardliners staged what would become a failed coup d’état to revive the collapsing Soviet Union.
Ridley Scott is back in some style with this largely captivating stranded-in-Mars sci-fi adventure that is a potent mix of science and thrills.
Boyle, Sorkin, Fassbender and Winslet deliver some of their best work in this talky if invigorating three-act ‘cinematic theatre’ centering on the Apple co-founder.
Akerman’s final film, shot in long takes that aren’t always compelling, features her late mother in the domesticity of her home as they enjoy the conversations and comfortable silences.
Feels modern in full-throttle blood-spurting style, yet also wholly in period with Shakespearean-speak – a violent, beautiful if occasionally emotionally distancing screen adaptation of the famous text.
For better or worse, this is possibly the director’s most accessible film to date, lacking the wondrous mysticism of his previous works, yet at the same time it feels more intimate as a personal elegy.
Polished and generally solid, this Cold War movie would rank as one of Spielberg’s good-but-not-great pictures.
Eternality Tan 