Leonardo Goi

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.