Clarence Tsui

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Office is undermined by a simplistic screenplay lacking the nuances and frisson one expects of a cutting-edge satire of a capitalist world propelled by graft and greed.

While the film is filled with shimmering images aplenty – including a literally sparkling trompe d’oeil – the director falls short of using the texture of his 16mm film stock to its full potential. The same could be said of his characters, who could do with more thoughtful fleshing out, while their slow-burning relationships generate more a sense of lethargy than melancholy.

Unfolding with faint whiffs of film noir, Meeting with Pol Pot boasts powerful performances from its cast, with Irène Jacob (Double Life of Veronique) and Cyril Gueï playing journalists whose professional demeanour unravels rapidly as they contend with the consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Hill of Freedom is Hong Sang-soo's shortest feature film to date. And it's his most lightweight, as well, with the Korean auteur merely reshuffling his tried-and-trusted play on non-linear structure, camera movements and characterizations without offering anything decidedly new

It's visually that Season of the Devil ranks among Diaz’s best work.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Deng and Yu have delivered a ceaseless juggernaut of incoherently-strung together gags like a lightweight Stephen Chow; this could make Adam Sandler, who could easily be imagined dabbling in something like this, look like a nuanced artist.

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.

The film is surprisingly shoddy stylistically.

Youth is a whirl of grand, dramatic gestures.

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.

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

The Nightingale is technically remarkable. Beyond its socio-political context, however, the film offers hardly anything inventive to the familiar generation-gap rite-of-passage dramedy.