Jessica Kiang

Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.

Panopticon may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.

As The Shadowless Tower ambles onward, it reveals its arcs of change not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology and, most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs.

An overlong but enjoyable metaphysical thriller that delivers pastiche so meticulous it becomes its own source of supremely cinematic pleasure.

If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, No Bears is where he slams on the brakes.

Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.