Leonardo Goi

Scenes do not begin or end in The Shadowless Tower so much as bleed and spill into each other, inviting you into a dreamscape where the boundary between fact and mirage is purposely blurry.

If Smoking may feel like an amalgam of leftover ideas, it finds a tenuous through line in the contagious love Dupieux imbues in the very act—and art—of bringing those fables to life.

The African Desperate is an electrifying, riveting odyssey, and Stingily—with her deadpan humor and no-nonsense swagger—makes its ending all the more cathartic.

There’s no denying the affection Winocour pours into Mia’s healing. For a drama dealing with a wound that’s still unbearably vivid, Memories is both tactful and heartfelt. But as time went on I found myself wondering how much more affecting the film might have turned out had Winocour chosen to complicate some of its heavy-handed metaphors and cliches.

It’s a work as faithful to its peculiar milieu as it is universal in its themes—a coming-of-age that feels, in a wistful and cumulatively moving way, like going back in time.

Shot by Jenkin on 16mm color negative with a 1970s clockwork Bolex and scored with post-synch sound, the film looks and sounds as a relic unearthed from one of the island’s caves. A chest stashed with stories in turns seductive and chilling, woven into a tale that will keep on unfurling, in an endless and confounding maze.

Taste is a lot more than the sum of its influences. The strange, disquieting world Lê beckons us into is entirely his making, and it brims with spell-binding images.

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

Overseas is a harrowing story of resilience, an elegy of people pushed to the margins, whom Yoon restitutes as dignified and strong-willed fighters, in a work that dances between reality and fiction to an engrossing extent.

It’s an exercise in empathy––and a spellbinding one at that.

A Girl Missing feels just as lost and hapless as its lead–more than on a quest for vengeance, a woman in search of a fully shaped self.

Take it as a real-time thriller, an intelligently crafted study in cinematic minimalism, and 7500 works. The trouble starts when Vollrath’s feature debut (a follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated short Everything Will Be Okay) attempts the landing.

Poking fun at those who left and those who couldn’t, Take Me Somewhere Nice conjures up a love letter to a restless generation mired in a frustrated quest for belonging — one that stretches far beyond the country and time it’s set in, and reads as an engrossing, bittersweet memoir.

Zhu Shengze’s poignant Present.Perfect. follows a dozen anchors over a period of ten months. It distills some 800 hours of live footage into a 124-minute documentary–a black-and-white collage stirring questions that far transcend the country and the zeitgeist it captures.

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.

La Flor shares Extraordinary Stories’ ambitious scope and structure, but takes them to a whole new level of resolutely rebellious narrative freedom.

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.

Matthias & Maxime lacks the raw, blazing energy Dolan can excel at.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film of incandescent scenes and staggering wonder.

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.

A ride that offers plenty of chuckle-inducing moments, but ultimately stalls in a swamp of meta-textual references and cinematic detritus.

There is something so perceptive in the way Giovannesi zeroes in on these embryonic mafia bosses–especially as Piranhas ventures into the kids’ relationship with the adult world around them–which makes for an enjoyable if patchy 105-minute ride.

Ghost Town Anthology percolates with the sadness of a place bracing for its untimely death–a landscape populated by psychically damaged wanderers, fumbling after an identity within and beyond the town that wouldn’t exist without them, and vice versa.

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.

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.

It is as compelling and urgent as it is impossible to stomach.

If the aftertaste is one of cinematic delight–the feeling of being invited to take part in those chats, not just to listen to them–credit goes to Assayas’ writing and a handful of phenomenal performances from the quartet and supporting cast.