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.