Three hours fly by in Hamaguchi’s gentle Cannes Best Screenplay winner—a highly-layered and nuanced take on the unresolved regrets and guilt that stay deep within us and the affordances of performance art and unlikely acquaintance as catharsis.
Sound as time, memory, life and death, the latest sensorial slow cinema entry from the Thai auteur starring a restrained Tilda Swinton is beautiful, hypnotic, and a much-needed sedative for our discomforting times.
Adam Driver is sensational in this unorthodox if tonally-uneven musical about the perils of celebrity culture that oscillates between feeling inspired and overdrawn.
More of a compilation of past concert performances (albeit in stunning audiovisual quality) than a documentary of new insight and depth, this will please and frustrate fans in equal measure.
This is pedagogy as cinema—an unobtrusive and highly-rewarding documentary centering on a veteran teacher and his ethnically-diverse students in a small town in Germany, earning every compelling bit of its nearly four-hour runtime.
Women meet politics as they bravely fight against rampant sexual assaults and for a more progressive country in this intimate home video-style, if sometimes unfocused, documentary about the aftermath of the Cairo Revolution.
It may be at times contrived and slow-moving, but this Iranian drama about the impact of a wrongful state execution on a family accumulates enough power to work.
The only entirely female-run news outlet in India is the subject of this inspiring documentary about the perseverance and courage of a close-knit team of Dalit women (born to the lowest caste) who are challenging deep-rooted traditions, toxic patriarchy and corruption through their firebrand style of justice-based grassroots journalism.
Zhang’s latest, an espionage thriller set in 1930s Manchuria, mostly works as a violent, intricately-plotted genre exercise about spies and traitors.
It feels like it’s operating one gear too low in terms of pacing, but this take on the trials and tribulations of Black Panther’s Fred Hampton—and a spy within his ranks—features outstanding work by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield.
