Jessica Kiang

This is a merciless film, and whether the process of teasing its meaning out for yourself feels like a punishment or a reward will depend entirely on your patience and your point of view.

Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.

First Love may be a fluffier, more eager-to-please bauble than Miike’s more challengingly outré titles, but like the cutesy mechanical toy puppy that turns up yapping in the middle of the film, it is wired to explode, and it is a blast.

Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.

The Immigrant is contained, restrained, thoughtful filmmaking that satisfies on nearly every level, except for the desire for a little chaos.

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Father Mother Sister Brother is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening.

No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.

Full of odd glitches and deliberate flubs in period detail, the film feels like an invitation into a secret conspiracy to reach back through time and, with deft, irreverent 21st-century fingers, loosen the stays on Empress Elisabeth’s corsetry just a little.

99 Homes is by no means a perfect film, but it can achieve something more precious, and rarer than glossy perfection: it can take you by the shoulders and shake the apathy and complacency away.

An offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels.

As a low-key romp with a twisty, globetrotting plot The Whistlers is an enjoyable affair with just enough of a slant to feel a little offbeat. But Porumboiu aficionados chasing the same weird high he has delivered time and again before — wherein a single moment can transform a ridiculous scheme into a fairy tale, or a silly notion into a grand philosophical quest — are just going to have to whistle for it.

Empowering, saddening, amusing and aggravating in roughly equal measure, with a very small side order of social critique, Bravo’s film marks a huge step up for her and a definitive answer to the question that @_zolarmoon posed to Twitter in October of 2015: yes, y’all do wanna hear the story about why she and this bitch here fell out!!!!!!!!

Structured as a low-key chase movie, unfolding with the dark urgency of a conspiracy thriller, living mostly not in your heart or even your mind but in the hairs on the back of your neck, "Midnight Special" actually emerges most resonantly as an almost mournful ode, or maybe a psalm, to the primal instincts of fatherhood.

It may refer inescapably to genre classics from elsewhere, but The Wild Goose Lake is like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground. Suddenly, China feels like the noirest place on Earth.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.

Murina is rife with symbolism, but it’s a mark of Kusijanović’s command — an astonishing quality for a first-time feature director — that the recurring motifs and metaphors are worn so lightly and feel so organic to the film’s microcosmic universe.