Clarence Tsui

Boasting a barnstorming performance from Yuumi Kawai (Plan 75), Desert of Namibia takes a seemingly banal love-triangle premise and runs with it in the most surprising, gripping and anarchic fashion possible.

[Kapadia’s] delicate touch remains very much the same, as she offers a gentle but clear critique of the challenges faced by women in India today.

Bolstered by lush imagery and, perhaps more importantly, immensely naturalistic performances from its non-professional child actors, the film conjures up a quietly heartbreaking drama that works on multiple levels. These nuances probably allowed Wang to elude the stringent demands of China's censors.

With his nod to the sparse mise-en-scene of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien (who produced his first short film Huashin Incident) and the philosophical reflections embodied in the films of Edward Yang — there's also a certain, faint echo of A Brighter Summer Day in the narrative here — Z has proved that the spirit of the New Taiwan Cinema remains very much alive.

At once Panh's personal eulogy to the victims of this pogrom (around one-fifth of Cambodia's population perished during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror) and a subtly informative treatise about history and universal humanity, Graves Without A Name is at once emotionally overwhelming, visually ravishing and intellectually stimulating.

Demanding attention, imagination and critical viewing from the audience, Chinese Portrait is nevertheless one for posterity.

Savage rivals most mid-budget Euro-American wintry police actioners in its lush production values and slick execution of genre tropes. There are plenty of visceral thrills on offer in the dark and violent confrontations between a hard-boiled detective and a gang of cold-blooded robbers, as the action unfolds in impressively choreographed sequences on Changbai’s snow-covered slopes in northeastern China.

Admittedly, Elephant is a heavy affair, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Hu's characters remain very real, and they are never shown as indulgent to the point of being above the banalities of everyday life. Barbed humor abounds, too, in matter-of-fact dialogue.

Dead Souls is thoroughly focused and tightly structured. And it is an immensely perceptive piece about the history of China and its multitude of discontents.

The veteran Philippine genre-meister's ultraviolent action blockbuster goes beyond easy moral binaries to highlight how Duterte's warped worldview has made monsters out of everyone from the police to the peddlers to the ordinary people in between, all of them doing the bloody bidding of a corrupt political class.

Bleeding Steel is all about old-school thrills, and Zhang has delivered a wide range of them, from cafeteria catfights to expansive pyrotechnics — with not just one but two crotch-kicking gags thrown in for good measure.

Youth is a whirl of grand, dramatic gestures.

Beyond the handful of obligatory escapades, gunfights and images of martyrdom, the film reveals itself as less a drama about extraordinary heroes than an illustration of life in a fallen city.

Expanding her premise into a reflection on an artist's challenge in portraying reality, the director's By the Time It Gets Dark is a magical, melancholic ode to the intellectual's struggle against the forces of history.

Defying its somewhat generic-sounding title, Johnny Ma's gripping criminal thriller Old Stone deploys powerful performances and eerie imagery.

Whereas there are still long takes aplenty, most of them startlingly exquisite, the film feels, for once, very urgent in relaying the faultlines of real Filipino history.

The Woman Who Left is an immensely immersive and engaging tale about a wronged individual's grueling struggle between reconciliation and revenge.

It's a gripping ride through the storm...with powerful imagery, a simple and accessible story and a stellar performance from Kim Yoon-seok.

More than just mining the past, Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang is fuelled by an anxious look toward the future - not just Jia's, but also that of his profession and his people as China marches on to the state-controlled drumbeat of economic liberalism and tight political control.

Radivojevic's film is a valiant call for a new way of thinking about the impact of immigration on abstract notions of nationhood.

Love at First Fight is overflowing with relentlessly acerbic humor that shapes the way the film's two young protagonists contend with not just each other, but also with the uncertainties of the world they're emerging into as adults.

Sunada has managed the incredible task of editing all these anecdotes into a flowing whole, an unfettered celebration of cinema as a concoction of vision, persistence, collective faith and, of course, some canniness about how the world operates. Rather than diminishing the seventh art's magic, Sunada's documentary enhances it.

An impressive debut driven by a timeline-blurring narrative and nuanced performances.

Snowpiercer is an ambitious piece with a universally comprehensible theme and accessible aesthetics.

True to Wong’s style, The Grandmaster is infused with melancholy and a near-existentialist resignation to the uncertainties of fate.