Ed Frankl

Asbæk is towering as Claus, never less than believable as the leader of his platoon, and standout as he comes to terms with the cracks in his own story.

The chemistry between these two men is inescapable, their relationship growing almost imperceptibly, composed expertly in a nuanced script by Lee and unfussily filmed by director of photography Joshua James Richards (Songs My Brothers Taught Me).

The film’s opening quirky comedy routines give way to something much richer––a startlingly observant, sharp, romantic, provocative, and poignant view of millennial culture and how life comes at you fast.

Sorry We Missed You is, simply, one of his best films that links the personal and the political.

This is an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance and sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory.

The final sequences about loss, and art as a “cure” (in Jodorowsky’s own words), are heart-wrenchingly powerful.

Not since A Short Film About Killing has a filmmaker produced such a thrilling case against capital punishment, an enraging, enthralling, enduring testament to the oppressed.

Guatemala’s first-ever entry for the foreign language Oscar is an absorbing, beautifully-shot drama of cultural ritual and the drive of one young woman to escape a rudimentary social system.

This is a strangely believable dystopia, and all the more brilliant for it.

All the Dead Ones is an accomplished film by directing duo Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, rich in the nation’s poetry and music, daring in highlighting women’s voices while commenting on Brazil’s history of inequality of wealth, class, and race.

For all its social-realist tendencies, A Chiara is told in a wonderfully fluid and poetic fashion.

There’s much to interest the Lynch fan here, but it also might be an unparalleled assessment of the artistic learning of a great American filmmaker.

This is a richly rewarding film, packed with ideas and riddles, that will surely benefit from repeat viewings.

This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.

As an exercise in depicting the disjointed link between national and personal identity, Synonyms is dazzling. As a portrait of displacement in a world becoming both more globalized and more nationalistic, it is a testament.

Zhao’s combination of the visual palette of Terrence Malick, the social backbone of Kelly Reichardt, and the spontaneity of John Cassavetes creates cinema verité in the American plains.

This is Jóhannsson’s first and last film, and its hard not to recognize that this is a director who arrived fully formed as a visual artist. His dreamy combination of sound and images, the editing and pacing, and his use of Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s grainy 16mm cinematography combine with strange potency.

Garrel has the touch of a wiser man not taking judgment on his characters’ youthful foibles, where setbacks are to be embraced and learned from rather than experiences discarded from memory.

Carried by two accomplished performance, and despite a tight 87-minute running time, this is a rich saga, bathed in atmosphere that disturbs as much as it engrosses.

Timely issues of transgender rights both in Latin and North America help make A Fantastic Woman a bolder, brasher film, fiery in comparison with Gloria’s relatively tenderness, but anchored once more by a stellar central performance

It’s a spiritual, ambiguously plotted journey through the Atlas Mountains, and those willing to give in to its mystical embrace and gorgeous visuals should find it a sensual, engrossing watch.

Its child’s viewpoint and pastel-colored animation belies a cruel melancholy at the heart of My Life as a Courgette, as all its children lust for a life that is different from their own.

This is a formally complex work, too long perhaps and occasionally opaque in its meaning, but a daring ride to those wanting to glimpse the best of African cinema.

This is a film of ideas, but it's a comedy first, and its boldness is that it doesn't aim to address a pro-choice or pro-life stance - it's about Donna just getting on with it all the same.

Sachs and Love Is Strange co-writer Mauricio Zacharias craft an intergenerational love story believably told and immaculately acted.

In his signature style, without talking heads, narration or explanatory context, Wiseman takes us straight into the London gallery itself and the inhabitants inside - both human and paint-form.

A luscious, strangely enchanting watch and terrific fun for those who'll launch themselves into it.

Quemada-Díez filmed The Golden Dream chronologically using natural light and real locations, utilising Super 16 film to give his first feature a documentary shimmer. He also worked as a camera operator on Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003), with whom he shares his penchant for opulent landscapes and narratives, and a sense of beauty amidst unforgiving reality.