Leonardo Goi

Earth Coincidence is crammed with so much information and so many detours it seems designed to leave your mind agog.

That I Only Rest in the Storm should overflow with ideas is not in itself an indictment; it’s that the film should gradually shed so many of its mysteries and ambiguities.

Seen from the vantage point of our hyper-digital 2020s, Jenkin isn’t just a stark outlier from the current media regime. He’s also among the very few working directors whose cinema feels both familiar and viscerally new.

For a director whose projects have always tested the medium’s capacity to conjure and make peace with the specters of one’s past, it feels like the kind of moment Romvari’s been working towards from the start.

After the Hunt aims to tackle our so-called cancel culture, but wrestling with that weighty topic isn’t the same as meaningfully reckoning with it; if there’s anything genuinely uncomfortable about Guadagnino’s film, it’s not button-pushing issues but the reactionary way it squanders them.

Stranger Eyes belongs to Lee. Whether or not Yeo wrote it with him in mind, I can’t think of a better performer to flesh out the chasm that powers the film: between different ways of looking, between fears as old as time itself and the state-of-the-art technology used to bring them to light.

The Secret Agent doesn’t just exist in conversation with the genre films from the decade in which most of it unfurls; it also testifies, time and again, to the director’s unwavering belief in cinema’s capacity to disquiet and mesmerize.

Panahi welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, his latest also serves as a superb thriller. It is a towering achievement.

If Loznitsa has cited Gogol and Kafka as touchstones, there are scenes in Two Prosecutors that echo the bleak absurdism of Roy Andersson.

There’s a defiant, rebellious energy thrumming through The Fishbowl, if only intermittently.

By the time Dream Team comes to its enigmatic ending, the journey has accrued a disorienting power––it’s the vertigo that comes from watching a film fearlessly pushing against the limits of what can be told, and how.

Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination.

With its deep, bold dives into the nightmarish and the surreal, The Sparrow in the Chimney is that rare film that feels like a catharsis for protagonist and director both.

Written by Hu and longtime collaborator Rui Ge, it embraces the same premise of countless a noir before it: a lone drifter comes home to start afresh, only to face the ghosts of his troubled past. What’s sensational about Hu’s latest is the way it undercuts that dread to land on an engrossing note that rings wholly, convincingly earned.

For all its morbid undertones and philosophical ruminations, Misericordia is neither a dirge nor a lofty symposium. Strange as it may be to say for a story that begins with a burial and then shatters after a heinous death, this is a supremely and surprisingly funny film, where humor gradually accrues a subversiveness not unlike desire’s own.

Serebrennikov’s English-language debut is as muddled as its subject, but––for all these glaring and convenient omissions––it is also one of the director’s strongest in quite some time, a film whose form feels wholly in service of the story and man at its center.

Dahomey begins where Statues Also Die ended, wondering what remains of our identities when the things those cling onto suddenly disappear––then resurface from oblivion. To this, Diop offers no clear answers. But in the heart-shaking passion of that university debate, in those students’ resolute commitment to reappropriate their own narratives, she finds something rarer still: a snapshot of a generation for whom this isn’t just the story of a restitution. It’s a resurrection.

Formulaic as it may come across, this is a sleek genre exercise, a horror crafted not to peddle some profound meaning, but to frighten and delight.

This is, at its core, the story of a resurrection, spiritual and sensorial; at its most transcendental, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell makes Thien’s awakening your own.

There’s something electrifying about a filmmaker willing to treat the medium as a permeable universe, to bring it into conversation with different art forms, and to test its limits with this much inventiveness. Jude, too, moves across his material with unremitting freedom, and the voyage is a testament to cinema’s shapeshifting power––what it can do, what it can be.

Proudly immune to narrative conventions, The Human Surge 3 doesn’t just ape an aesthetic that’s become so prominent in our screen-mediated lives, but wonders what can be built upon it.

Besson hopscotches from slapstick comedy to lachrymose junctures where Landry Jones is asked to conjure a sense of catharsis Dogman never really earns. His performance is a showcase of primal gestures and bare-breasted torment, but what the actor’s tasked with embodying isn’t a character, only the chrysalis of one.

Neither twee nor saccharine, Anderson’s aesthetic tends to mirror the auras and oddball personalities of his films. In a work suffused with stupefying mysteries, the strange visions Henry Sugar teems with echo its drifters’ wide-eyed wonder as well as their creator’s. It’s an infectious feeling.

Yannick may boast fewer visual flourishes than the director’s previous, but this more minimalist approach only heightens the young rebel and the film’s own fight: an attempt to change the rules of the game, to blur the divide between author and viewer, and open up the medium to the absurd––if only for 67 exuberant minutes.

One of the greatest mysteries behind Ceylan’s cinema is how his talk-heavy sprawls manage to escape the aloofness of the chamber dramas they so often unspool as. Grasses is another scintillating example of that paradox, a film in which chats do not unfurl so much as detonate.

Even as it routinely threatens to get lost in a head-spinningly knotty plot, the director’s kinetic approach and gallows humor makes Kubi a singular addition to Kitano’s oeuvre.

A Brighter Tomorrow may be soaked in nostalgia, but it’s a nostalgia with a reactionary twang. Its title, in retrospect, feels oddly ironic. This is a screed from a director unwilling to look at the future with more than just contempt, where the “tomorrow” is really just a rose-tinted fantasia of long gone past.

Blanchett gives a committed turn as the conflicted nun, but all her emphatic exertions cannot resurrect a story that forsakes its mysticism for a calculated parable, as well-intentioned as it is turgid.

As with every epiphany, It Is Night in America is both unsettling and liberating.

For a film that seldom lets us step outside Andrew’s car, this is a most evocative, soul-replenishing journey; for one that just as rarely lets us look at its protagonist in the face, this is an astonishingly full-rounded, richly textured portrait of a life, epic in size and scope.

Flowers, in that, feels both ancient and novel. It’s a film whose visual experiments invite one to see the world anew, even as the demons that fuel it harken back to a passion for storytelling that’s as old as time itself.

Music is a beguiling film, one whose steady, exquisitely crafted frames only amplify the strength of emotions thrumming just beneath them.

Scenes do not begin or end in The Shadowless Tower so much as bleed and spill into each other, inviting you into a dreamscape where the boundary between fact and mirage is purposely blurry.

If Smoking may feel like an amalgam of leftover ideas, it finds a tenuous through line in the contagious love Dupieux imbues in the very act—and art—of bringing those fables to life.

The African Desperate is an electrifying, riveting odyssey, and Stingily—with her deadpan humor and no-nonsense swagger—makes its ending all the more cathartic.

There’s no denying the affection Winocour pours into Mia’s healing. For a drama dealing with a wound that’s still unbearably vivid, Memories is both tactful and heartfelt. But as time went on I found myself wondering how much more affecting the film might have turned out had Winocour chosen to complicate some of its heavy-handed metaphors and cliches.

It’s a work as faithful to its peculiar milieu as it is universal in its themes—a coming-of-age that feels, in a wistful and cumulatively moving way, like going back in time.

Shot by Jenkin on 16mm color negative with a 1970s clockwork Bolex and scored with post-synch sound, the film looks and sounds as a relic unearthed from one of the island’s caves. A chest stashed with stories in turns seductive and chilling, woven into a tale that will keep on unfurling, in an endless and confounding maze.

Taste is a lot more than the sum of its influences. The strange, disquieting world Lê beckons us into is entirely his making, and it brims with spell-binding images.

This is an entrancing film, orphaned by an unspeakable longing for a place–a whole world–that will never return.

Overseas is a harrowing story of resilience, an elegy of people pushed to the margins, whom Yoon restitutes as dignified and strong-willed fighters, in a work that dances between reality and fiction to an engrossing extent.

It’s an exercise in empathy––and a spellbinding one at that.

A Girl Missing feels just as lost and hapless as its lead–more than on a quest for vengeance, a woman in search of a fully shaped self.

Take it as a real-time thriller, an intelligently crafted study in cinematic minimalism, and 7500 works. The trouble starts when Vollrath’s feature debut (a follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated short Everything Will Be Okay) attempts the landing.

Poking fun at those who left and those who couldn’t, Take Me Somewhere Nice conjures up a love letter to a restless generation mired in a frustrated quest for belonging — one that stretches far beyond the country and time it’s set in, and reads as an engrossing, bittersweet memoir.

Zhu Shengze’s poignant Present.Perfect. follows a dozen anchors over a period of ten months. It distills some 800 hours of live footage into a 124-minute documentary–a black-and-white collage stirring questions that far transcend the country and the zeitgeist it captures.

More than a film about physically different people, this dryly humorous and ever-perceptive oddball focusses on our relationship toward that difference, and the uplifting moment when cinema ceases to sensationalize it, but lets it act as an engine of creation.

La Flor shares Extraordinary Stories’ ambitious scope and structure, but takes them to a whole new level of resolutely rebellious narrative freedom.

Diop speaks her own language–and Atlantics’ is one of seductive, confounding beauty. This is a story that treats its unspeakable tragedy as such: a world-shattering crisis told not through conventional storytelling, but conjured up from the realm of dreams, nightmares, and visions. A reverie as perturbing and hypnotic as the sea that washes it ashore.

Matthias & Maxime lacks the raw, blazing energy Dolan can excel at.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film of incandescent scenes and staggering wonder.

A Hidden Life is an invocation, the wrenching and unheeded plea of a man struggling to preserve his humanity intact as the world around him plunges deeper into evil, and worse, watches motionless and indifferent as said evil blossoms, spreads, and becomes normalized.

A ride that offers plenty of chuckle-inducing moments, but ultimately stalls in a swamp of meta-textual references and cinematic detritus.

There is something so perceptive in the way Giovannesi zeroes in on these embryonic mafia bosses–especially as Piranhas ventures into the kids’ relationship with the adult world around them–which makes for an enjoyable if patchy 105-minute ride.

Ghost Town Anthology percolates with the sadness of a place bracing for its untimely death–a landscape populated by psychically damaged wanderers, fumbling after an identity within and beyond the town that wouldn’t exist without them, and vice versa.

The Other Side of the Wind is not a comeback picture in the sense Touch of Evil was supposed to be. It is a confounding, unsettling, disorienting adieu from a director whose nonconformist and uncompromising vision was decades ahead of his time.

Shadow brings heart and spectacle together, and the result is a bombastic martial arts wuxia replete with duels of breath-taking beauty that will please longtime Zhang acolytes and newbies alike.

It is as compelling and urgent as it is impossible to stomach.

If the aftertaste is one of cinematic delight–the feeling of being invited to take part in those chats, not just to listen to them–credit goes to Assayas’ writing and a handful of phenomenal performances from the quartet and supporting cast.

If Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s 2015 Mustang – a feature that would make for a terrific double bill – shares with Sibel a perceptive eye for the way a cancerous patriarchy can stifle a girl’s coming of age, Sibel takes the critique a step further, shedding light on its cross-gender repercussions.

Perceptively, the mix of hope and anxieties permeating the commune serves as an allegory that stretches far beyond the cordillera. Political commentaries abound all throughout Too Late to Die Young, but Sotomayor parcels them out with jaw-dropping subtlety.

Slow-paced and meditative, Hotel by the River is a director’s plunge into a milieu where chuckles go hand in hand, often to ambiguous and conflicting extents, with a melancholic bracing for death.

Where the new entry lacks in bloodshed and bone-splintering violence, it still confirms Zahler’s penchant for complicated characters, and conjures up a bad cops action movie which, despite blips in tension and a second half far superior to the first, crystallizes Zahler’s as a key name to watch for lovers of the genre.

At Eternity’s Gate is a film made by an artist (“plates painter” Schnabel) less concerned with a painter, more with the way a painter saw the world. In its rupture from traditional biographical narratives, it does not merely stand out as unconventional biopic–it also comes close to resuscitating the idea of cinema as moving pictures.

Credit for A Star is Born‘s heartwarming aura is owed less to Cooper’s own directing (assured and judicious a debut as it may be) than to the freshness and credibility brought by his fellow superstar. Believe the pre-premiere hype: Lady Gaga is nothing short of extraordinary.

Whether or not the thought of following a self-absorbed wannabe filmmaker for 136 minutes has you buzzing with excitement, A Paris Education is a wonderfully anachronistic homage to a timeless, New Wave-style world filled with cinephiles, lovers, and great films. It’s a universe as self-centered as it is endlessly fascinating.

Endlessly quotable and serendipitously timely — all the more so considering the whole project was conceived nine years ago — The Favourite is a zany, piercing close-up on three women so replete with swagger as to reduce their male counterparts to disposable extras.

In its tragic undertones, complex psychological edifice, and claustrophobic visuals, First Man stands out, in both content and form, as a remarkable, jaw-dropping departure from anything Chazelle has previously made.

Judiciously gritty in its specifics, Araby’s scope is ecumenical.

Its jaw-dropping and gripping beauty does not stem from a drama-filled storyline, but from the simplicity with which Simón captures the worldview of her alter-ego heroine, and the complex power struggles Frida engages with her new family.

Foroughi’s assured debut remains a welcomed and insightful reminder that the patriarchy Ava struggles against is still alive and kicking. Stories like hers will hardly ever grow old.