Patrick Gamble

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Combining a realist setting with a dreamlike style, The Road to Mandalay could easily have become a well-intentioned polemic, yet thanks to Midi Z’s brilliant command of visual metaphors and compassion for his subjects it’s elevated into a an unnervingly immediate portrait of the human cost of displacement.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An exquisitely rendered study of entitlement and millennial dissatisfaction.

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.

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.

This deeply felt Paraguayan drama shines a light on the nation’s fractured identity by crossing numerous generational and class divides.

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

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

Schipper's script doesn't quite complement his technical prowess and once you peer behind the smoke and mirrors of the film's one-take gimmick the criminal-underworld lurking behind it feels trite and contrived.... Yet none of this can take away from its pure entertainment factor. An experience akin to a burst of pure adrenaline intravenously introduced to your bloodstream, Victoria remains one helluva ride.

With little action taking place for the majority of the film, this slow boiling story is more of an insightful character study than a heart pounding thriller.

Effective in articulating how relationships work as a way of transferring and understanding the unspoken and unseen feelings that lay dormant within us all, Netzer's intelligent portrait of a ticking time-bomb relationship sadly lacks the warmth and tenderness required for it ever to ignite.

A slow-burning drama about slavery in all its forms, this austere, visually striking film combines a harrowing period of Brazilian history with devastating accuracy of emotion.

The Falling's refreshingly all-female perspective expects the viewer to become wholly caught up in its broad surge of feeling, yet there's something unsatisfactory and disaffecting about the film's asinine finale.

An adroit, and trashy thriller leached of all its significance by a plot that spirals uncontrollably into lunacy, Unsane takes the feverish temperature of a country enraged by sexual harassment and decides to turn up the heat.

Choosing to focus more time on the uncoordinated instinctual trends of the subconscious rather than the moralising role of the cognisant, Enemy lacks the humanity to relate to on an emotional level, ultimately tempering the brooding anxiety and distilling our intrigue into mild curiosity towards the oblique narrative rather than fostering the original menace into something more substantial.

Cheap Thrills is a commendably flawed experiment in imbuing social anxiety with genre shocks.

Ixcanul may struggle to tackle the larger issue it posits but well represents the lives and rituals of the marginalised community it seeks to give a voice.

The reticent interactions of Lanthimos’ trio of despairing souls mirrors the faded hopes of a transitory generation of dreamers, yet sadly Kinetta is too lost amongst the small, ostensibly insignificant gestures of its characters to truly grasp the larger movements occurring within the periphery.

Littered with keen observations about modern life and gentle moments of dark humour, this tale of how we live now masks a tender exploration of the human body as the last refuge in a world of binary oppression.

Kahn floats the idea that it’s not simply God who has enraptured Thomas’ soul, but his desire to exist within a society that accepts him. Sadly the mechanical aspects of the film’s plotting mean these ideas never manage to bubble to the surface

Uneven, convoluted and laden with far too many twists and turns Creepy sadly struggles to balance both terror and suspense, with any intrigue dissipating long before the film's secrets are eventually unravelled.

No doubt many will find German’s approach pretentious and overly repetitive.

With God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, Mitevska has fashioned yet another bleak satire about Hegemonic masculinity in the Balkans.

Collins' revolutionary-lite rhetoric has become unravelled by the commercially driven decision to split the final novel into two films - ultimately lessening the satirical bite and reverting to the very gender archetypes it originally sought to challenge.

A desire to avoid sentimentality is admirable, yet Still Alice relies entirely on Moore's performance to mask its multitude of shortcomings.

A postmodern experiment in both form and function, Life of Riley's rigidity can at times feel like its restricting its actors, leaving them unable to treads the boards with the same authority they would on the stage.

Each scene is presented like a taro card for the viewer to assign his or her own meaning. Occasionally this can lead to a profound and deeply personal connection to the film whilst at others it can feel like Malick is overreaching; with large swaths of the narrative washing over you like an agreeable summer's breeze.

By interchanging bawdy gaiety and a ponderous attitude to emphasise the film's spiritual message, Calvary feels extremely disjointed, struggling to balance its dualistic tone on top of its oversized ensemble cast.

Coherence is a debut of tremendous ambition and potential, yet sadly, despite some genuine moments of tension, the film ironically makes too many wrong turns and its convoluted themes fail to coalesce on a human level, tempering the initial intrigue and culminating in a plaintive sense of admiration, rather than enraptured adulation.

Despite being exquisitely shot and flowing with an inescapably graceful stride that seems in accordance with the film's titular dance, The Tango Lesson works far better as a deconstruction of the creative process than it does as a satire on the industry.

A mood piece first and foremost, Abbasi takes the intense feelings of early adolescence, and watches how tragedy transforms them.

Despite Blanchett's resplendent performance and the comforting assurances that are inherent with any excursion into the reliably innocuous Disney universe it's tough to overlook the fact that there's something depressingly antiquated about Branagh's dazzling fairytale and its regressive sexual politics.

An otherwise intelligent piece that favours deftness of touch over bombastic thrills, A Most Wanted Man is an efficient espionage drama that, whilst in no way revelatory, is attuned to its source material's non-heroic and morally ambiguous approach to a well-worn genre.

Félicité is an emotionally effective heart-tugger, thanks largely to Véro Tshanda Beya's dignified lead performance.

A rollercoaster ride of tongue-in-cheek cliché, there's plenty of fun to be had with this cheekily reverential horror; yet, a dependence on the sexualisation of the female form anchors the film firmly within 'knowing' horror misogyny.

Schechter's latest marks its arrival with a fanfare of style and sass, but lacks the necessary bite to leave a lasting impression.

There's a measured, almost clinical precision to how On Body and Soul is shot that, while in keeping with Mária's great fragility and terrible need for affection, prevents the film from really delivering.

Loaded with unremarkable statements on moral resolve and brimming with arrogance, this desultory study of grief and the need for an artist to suffer in order to create great art is as hollow and throwaway as the redundant platitude it derives its name from.

The film feels like yet another product of the recent studio appropriation of mumblecore as a commodity, ultimately removing any semblance of individualism and feeling like just another product off the factory conveyor belt.

Petzold struggles to keep hold of the reigns, wielding the effects of melodrama with little to no precision or psychological acuity, and leaving the essential romance at the heart of the story to be rendered almost entirely unbelievable.

A handsomely crafted, yet overacted revenge tale with a broken moral compass, Prisoners fails to build upon its taut atmosphere of suspense with anything of particular social value.

Sadly, Schroeder lacks the confidence required to elevate this average drama into something more substantial.

Accomplished as the filmmaking is, on a certain level the directors’ good intentions fall flat, resulting in an often clever but fundamentally flimsy comedy.

The Commune is a film built around the intangibility and melancholy of childhood memories. What should have been a gritty work about a generation confronted with the implausibility of their beliefs is ultimately a banal and self-absorbed drama.