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.