Hosoda’s work here is generally delightful, but it is perhaps too slick and flashy to overcome its sometimes laboured storytelling about family and lineage.
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Mirai (2018)
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Tag / 2018
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Donbass (2018)
A rare narrative feature from one of the world’s foremost documentarians of Soviet history, this vignette-style dark absurdist satire doesn’t pull its punches from depicting the sorry state of affairs in Russian-occupied Eastern Ukraine.
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Ayka (2018)
An extraordinary work of hard-hitting social realism that recalls the Dardennes’ ‘Rosetta’ and Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, set in the harsh wintry conditions of Moscow as a young Kyrgyz woman abandons her baby to find work to pay off insurmountable debts.
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Asako I & II (2018)
Excellent performances of nuance and subtlety aside, Hamaguchi’s work here is emotionally rich but its plot shifts remain unconvincingly executed.
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Ready Player One (2018)
Don’t think too much—this is Spielberg channeling his geeky gamer self, and darn, it is enjoyable.
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Transit (2018)
Too overly-plotted, Petzold’s attempt at revising Casablanca for the modern age—and in his own oblique style and sensibility—doesn’t come out as deeply compelling as his best works.
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Trial, The (2018)
It gets dull after a while, but the context—a Soviet fabricated show trial ordered by Stalin to frame and prosecute ‘anti-communists’ in the eyes of the public—is still an eye-opening look at character assassination on a national, ideological level, nearly a century ago.
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Isle of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson’s quirky set-in-Japan dogs’ tale is breathtaking in its stop-motion animation detail, while accruing a rhythmic sense of movement and storytelling momentum from start to end.
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Knife + Heart (2018)
Yann Gonzalez’s decent sophomore feature continues his penchant for stylish, hallucinatory and provocative filmmaking in this serial killer mystery centering on a French gay porn producer.
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Sisters Brothers, The (2018)
The great Jacques Audiard’s first English-language film entertains with strong performances by Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, tackling the Western genre with rare wit and verve.
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Eternality Tan 