Patrick Gamble

A formally dazzling, half-comic portrait of a community struggling against the tides of change.

Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent individualism.

At just over three-hours, So Long, My Son is an emotionally wrenching film that’s epic in scope but intimate in feeling.

The topic of who can participate in the arts often ignores society’s racial prejudices and class assumptions, thankfully The Plagiarists’ perfectly judged mimicry of independent cinema illustrates the profound effect a lack of diversity has on the type of art that gets made.

Inviting mystery, ambiguity, and a pervasive sense of unease, Ghost Town Anthology is an entrancing yet unsettling allegory that builds like the pressure of an approaching storm that never quite arrives.

Rich with scenes of affection and reconciliation, the most charming thing about Fourteen is the degree to which Sallitt finds a balance between his own brand of independent filmmaking and the kind of French middle-class realism he’s clearly influenced by.

Endlessly thought-provoking, the disturbing nature of this quite incredible work cultivates a long-lasting sense of unease in the viewer and achieves what all good documentaries aim to do – it remains firmly lodged in you mind and refuses to loose its terrible grip.

A conspicuous example of political cinema made into art, The Wild Boys has more ideas in its 110 minute runtime than most filmmakers have in their entire oeuvres; jumping gleefully into the murky waters of gender politics and taking great delight in the overflowing bounty of cinephilic pleasures and vulgar perversities that spurt onto the screen.

A deeply felt personal journey, the film shifts seamlessly from unflinching realism to a poetic expression of masculinity in crisis; crossing back-and-forth across the blurred boundary that separates art and reportage to create a totally unforgettable film about the bond between people and place.

The Green Fog is part city symphony, part playful tribute; but primarily an example of pure, unadulterated cinematic delirium.

Quillévéré has created a poignant exploration not just of death, but of life, love and fragility.

It's a curt, nasty and deftly acted chamber piece high on laughs and savagery about frustrated idealism and how little it takes to make society fall to pieces.

Using comedy to chase away the despair of modern life, The Other Side of Hope is a thoroughly satisfying and distinctively lovable film.

It's how the film handles grief and alienation which makes Marina's story so compelling.

An empathetic depiction of two marginalised ways of life; God's Own Country is a deeply felt romance that harnesses the primal relationship between people and place.

Capturing the agony and ecstasy of young love, Call Me by Your Name is a major addition to the queer cinema canon - a deeply felt movie that's bittersweet, tender and true.

A low-key yet complex family drama, My Happy Family is a quietly devastating portrait of what it means to be a woman in a man's world.

An exquisitely rendered study of entitlement and millennial dissatisfaction.

An ornately mounted story marked with tints of antiquarianism, The Lost City of Z is perhaps Gray's most accomplished film to date.

Blending and bending genres to highlight the elusiveness of the truth, Green's avant-garde documentary presents the audience with a wealth of interviewees, each giving their own account of how the murder was reported.

Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart.

A poignant study of gender politics enshrined within an anthropologically fascinating drama.

As with all of Farhadi's films there's a frailty behind his characters, with their insecurities and moral dilemmas bubbling to the surface as the director slowly raises the temperature in this pressure cooker of domestic strife. Nervous editing and sinuous cinematography also give the impression that Farhadi is choreographing his stars rather than directing them.

A fluent, confident and deeply felt work by an astute chronicler of life, Things to Come considers the fragility of ideas when exposed to the eroding force of time in beautifully humane fashion.

Hard to Be a God is a cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen.

The Club is an enthralling parable that's calibrated to shock and amuse in equal measure.

Poetic realism for a digital age, Tangerine also shares a lot of qualities with the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. There's no cheap manipulation here and Baker's characters never come across as victims.

Inhabiting the space between fact and fiction, where repressed memories often seek refuge, The Pearl Button weaves a fascinating, yet traumatic route through Chile's recent history.

The Forbidden Room (2015) is Maddin's aesthetic nearing critical mass, a whimsical, genre-spanning opus that demonstrates the totality of his enigmatic style.

By adopting an eerily voyeuristic approach and filming the barren North Dakota landscape with a cold, penetrating gaze Welcome to Leith creates a bone chilling atmosphere not too dissimilar to a horror film; leading the audience down a compelling, yet genuinely unnerving path into the darkest rudiments of the human psyche.

The Gift might not smash the boundaries of genre filmmaking but therein lies its appeal; a smart, well-made thriller that balances high-minded cinema with genre thrills.

Most importantly, Appropriate Behaviour is funny, and not just sporadically entertaining, the film is a riotous series of mishaps from start to finish.

Despite falling into the occasional genre trap, every step of Catch Me Daddy points to a pair of filmmakers unafraid to make brave and interesting choices.

The performances of both Moss and Waterston are tremendous, filling the empty spaces of the frame with a suffocating mist of pain and suffering.

While the film's mischievous narrative manipulation will inevitably irk some viewers, this beautifully rendered opportunity to view the world through the eyes of those who can no longer see is a smart and moving portrayal of living with an ocular condition.

An exercise in assigning valuable historical context to scenes of brutality, Concerning Violence is a lesson in understanding a continuing colonial condition, the roots and complexities of which are often concealed and simplified by news coverage of poverty and conflict.

Girlhood's non-patronising and credible representation of class, race and gender is a rare and perceptive illustration of the intricacies of social inequality.

Tsai's Stray Dogs is a masterpiece of social-realism, a distinctive and beguiling study of society's displaced and marginalised that plays to the beat of its own drum and refuses to conform to cinema's own commodification.

Snowpiercer evolves steadily, growing richer with every step and slowly feeding us morsels of information - enriching this ludicrous premise with enough magic and wonder to suspend our disbelief entirely.

It's Coogler's confrontational depiction of police brutality and his attempts to represent the society he aims to inspire and inform that makes Fruitvale Station such essential viewing.

A nefarious misadventure that's technical prowess and heartbreaking lead performance belies its economical pedigree, Saulnier's farcical tale is punctuated with irregular scenes of dark, bumbling humour whilst a wanton disregard for the bellicose testosterone of similar tales successfully constructs a tense and naturally opaque mood that broods with the clammy tension of an impending storm.

An exceptional film anchored by love and set alight with the unpredictability of mental health, this is a must for Cassavetes fans and newcomers alike.

Ginghină makes for a wonderfully eccentric subject, and the ardour with which he elucidates the intricacies of his project to Porumboiu is both hilarious and tragic.

A display of dazzling and disorientating technique, this interior tale of a young girl’s mental disintegration is like falling through a hall of mirrors, with each performance reflecting and refracting a portion of Madeline’s personality as fantasy and reality become impossible to separate.

Like delving into a cold cave of human emotion, Three Colours: Blue is the jewel in the crown of Kieślowski’s trilogy – a fascinating examination of freedom, sorrow and identity, and perhaps one of the most necessary films of contemporary French cinema.

Three Colours: White brings Kieślowski back to his Polish roots and explores issues of equality through nationality and the fragile dynamic of marriage.

Three Colours: Red is the trilogy’s anti-romance, depicting an unconventional love story blossoming against the insurmountable obstacle of age – perhaps the most adventurous and personal of the trilogy,

Truly one of the most emotionally devastating films to have ever graced the big screen, Au Hasard Balthazar is an exemplary example of Bresson’s art that transcends its symbolic reverie to Christianity to become an eloquent prayer for the potential power of cinema to truly move us.

A bold and colourful, but by no means superficial portrait of femininity, Daughter of Mine successfully embodies a set of ideas – and anxieties – about motherhood that eloquently reflect a contemporary need to reevaluate the traditional family unit.

A lovingly crafted and well observed story about adolescent self discovery – and to this day remains one of the most remarkable films produced by Studio Ghibli.

A major contributor to the reverential narrative of wistful cinema, Giuseppe Tornatore’s magnum opus Cinema Paradiso is an elegant distillation of the form’s escapist qualities and the garland of an industry that understands global audiences’ enduring appetite for wild nostalgia.