Truffaut’s overlooked sophomore feature, a playful crime-noir, is shot with a rare, improvisational style, about a bit-part piano player who unexpectedly gets embroiled with lowly if persistent gangsters.
Assayas’ first feature isn’t really great but it still is an enigmatic treatise on the tension between youthful idealism and fatalism as a group of friends with music ambitions rethink their existence after a plan goes awry, leaving blood in their hands.
A Trans-Siberian train journey turns into a ‘Trans-Mongolian’ detour on the steppes as a group of Westerners find themselves ‘enjoying’ the hospitality of a Mongolian Princess and her people, in an oddly-structured but exuberant work that challenges exoticist assumptions in East-West cultural discourse.
Not particularly satisfying overall, but Huppert’s always fantastic playing characters with dark, ulterior motives in this psychological drama from Chabrol.
The pleasures of food and romance in cinema make an exquisite return with one of 2023’s most underappreciated gems, about a renowned chef and his long-serving cook in their autumnal years whom he one day hopes to marry.
Akerman’s rarely-seen made-for-TV documentary about Pina Bausch is intimate, minimalist and soul-stirring as the famous choreographer goes on a European tour with her company of dancers.
An enjoyable sophomore rom-com from Triet about ‘courtrooms and bedrooms’ as a lawyer’s personal life becomes murkily entwined with her professional exploits.
A married man finds out that his ex-lover and her husband have moved into a neighbouring house in Truffaut’s penultimate feature about the inevitability of extramarital affairs—it covers familiar thematic ground but the director’s sure-handed grip on the narrative gives it illicit thrills.
This Locarno Golden Leopard winner, through its radical film language and vibrant experimentation with form, speaks to the disenchanting African experience in France where the Blacks have been continually ostracised, discriminated and exoticised.
A masterful crime thriller by Melville with one of the most intricate heist sequences ever shot.
Eternality Tan 