The banality of cultural tourism as variety show is poetically expressed in the hands of Kiyoshi Kurosawa as a Japanese crew travel to Uzbekistan for work—it also features an underrated performance by ex-AKB48 J-pop star Atsuko Maeda.
Roy Andersson’s latest won’t turn heads, but it is a tender, and at times, world-weary look at the fallibility of human beings as they eke out a despairing existence.
A conventional documentary about an unconventional instrument—the ancient shakuhachi—and the people who seek spiritual clarity through playing it.
A modest if tender documentary about an Alzheimer’s-stricken father (a retired Peking opera director) and his son (a multimedia artist) who try to heal through art and the creative process as they witness the ravages of time on their mortal connection.
There’s something elusively poetic about this dementia drama from Chang Tso-chi that elevates it into rich yet nuanced work about a fractured family’s relational dynamics in flux.
A dead body is found in the Mongolian steppes in this sublimely-shot if at times bizarre arthouse tale about carnal desires and the cycle of life.
The mid-‘90s assassination of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is radically told from the point-of-view of the assassin in this urgent and incisive sociopolitical-thriller about the dangers of holding extremist worldviews.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan meets Diao Yi’nan in the lawless Kazakh steppes in this brilliant slow-burning investigative procedural about systemic corruption and chronic violence, directed by one of Central Asian cinema’s most distinctive voices.
Mendoza’s latest doesn’t quite come together as he employs sketchy animation against his docu-realist style in an overdrawn child cancer drama with an allegorical intent that never hits any mark.
While it is a rather entertaining treatise on the extremes of power abuse, and contains the usual violent, sexual and immoral provocations that have characterised Sion Sono’s output, it ultimately doesn’t cut deep enough to be a rewarding experience.
Eternality Tan 