7.1
“A masterpiece. Christian Petzold is one of the great directors of this young century.” —Jordan Raup, The Film Stage
8.2
Martin Scorsese masterfully evokes Hitchcock, classic noir, and gothic horror in this baroquely stylized psychological thriller. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is dispatched to an asylum for the criminally insane on foreboding Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient—but then the disturbing dreams about his dead wife (Michelle Williams) set in, he starts having flashbacks to Dachau, and he begins to suspect that something sinister is afoot. What is head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) really up to?
8.1
A breathtakingly intimate romance unfolds against a sweeping backdrop of social upheaval in renowned director Chen Kaige’s sumptuous saga of passion, fate, and the transcendent possibilities of art. Spanning fifty years of twentieth-century Chinese history, FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE follows aspiring actors Dieyi (a heartbreaking Leslie Cheung) and Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) as they emerge from a childhood of brutal training to become Beijing-opera stars, with life mirroring art as Dieyi’s unrequited love for Xiaolou and the country’s changing political tides engulf them in their own personal tragedies of jealousy and betrayal. The first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or is epic filmmaking of the highest order—visually and emotionally ravishing from frame to exquisite frame.
7.7
Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation. They stop at a busy service station and Saskia is abducted. After three years and no sign of Saskia, Rex begins receiving letters from the abductor.
4.4
After attempting suicide, a young woman (Amira Casar) makes a startling proposition to the man (Rocco Siffredi) who rescued her: she will pay him to watch her naked body over the course of four nights as long as he provides “impartial” commentary about what he sees. Thus ensues ANATOMY OF HELL, one of the most controversial films of Catherine Breillat’s career—a singularly daring meditation on the pleasures and horrors of the flesh. Buoyed by the two leads’ fearless performances, HELL is as much a philosophical treatise on the hidden traumas of sexuality as it is an increasingly unsettling battle of the sexes, with Breillat using a hushed chamber-play setup to show the spectator no quarter throughout the transgressive proceedings. The result is like nothing else, even within the director’s audacious oeuvre: her deepest expression of anguish over the unspeakable ecstasies and degradations of the body erotic.
8
Described by director Richard Kelly as “‘The Catcher in the Rye’ as told by Philip K. Dick,” this cult classic is a mind-altering experience whose metaphysical enigmas are still being unraveled. Troubled teen Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal in his breakout role) narrowly escapes death in a freak plane accident only to find himself consumed by visions of a six-foot rabbit named Frank, who informs him that the universe will end in precisely twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds. Now, Donnie must deal with the stresses of adolescence while seemingly slipping through the cracks of time, space, and sanity.
7.7
“A movie of soaring visual majesty and churning emotional force.” —Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
6.4
After a decade-long absence, Catherine Breillat triumphantly returns with an exploration of the themes that have made her one of cinema’s most rousing and controversial directors: the ecstasies and wounds of sexuality, and its power to unsettle. A remarkably inscrutable Léa Drucker plays Anne—an attorney advocating for abused minors—who enjoys an enviable lifestyle with her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), a milquetoast businessman and ineffectual father to Théo (newcomer Samuel Kircher), his troubled teenage son from a previous marriage. Compelled by her stepson’s Apollonian beauty, Anne embarks on an affair that threatens the stability of her household, along with her professional integrity, as she faces a choice between accountability and deception. Original music by Kim Gordon and radiantly expressionist cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie heighten the erotic and ethical tensions of LAST SUMMER, Breillat’s latest foray into the outer limits of desire.
7.5
With her stirring and sensitive second feature, Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani (ADAM) weaves a richly emotional tapestry of love, forbidden desire, and compassion that’s as beautifully wrought as the luxuriant fabrics that fill its sensuous frames. Tailor Halim (Saleh Bakri) and his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal), run a traditional caftan store in one of Morocco’s oldest medinas. In order to keep up with the requests of the demanding customers, they hire Youssef (Ayoub Missioui). The talented apprentice shows an utmost dedication in learning the art of embroidery and tailoring from Halim. Slowly Mina realizes how much her husband is moved by the presence of the young man, and a delicate push-pull between three hearts ensues.
7.6
After death, people have a week to choose only one memory to keep for eternity.
7.4
Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the chaotic world around him careens toward the madness and folly of World War II, Oskar pounds incessantly on his beloved tin drum and perfects his uncannily piercing shrieks. THE TIN DRUM, which earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, is Volker Schlöndorff’s visionary adaptation of Nobel laureate Günter Grass’ acclaimed novel, characterized by surreal imagery, arresting eroticism, and clear-eyed satire.
7.6
GODZILLA (a.k.a. GOJIRA) is the roaring granddaddy of all monster movies. It’s also a remarkably humane and melancholy drama, made in Japan at a time when the country was reeling from nuclear attack and H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Its rampaging radioactive beast, the poignant embodiment of an entire population’s fears, became a beloved international icon of destruction, spawning almost thirty sequels.
7.5
With this passion project, screenwriter-producer-director Martin Rosen brilliantly achieved what had been thought nearly impossible: a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits under terrible threat from modern forces. With its naturalistic hand-drawn animation, dreamily expressionistic touches, gorgeously bucolic background design, and elegant voice work from such superb English actors as John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Richard Briers, and Denholm Elliott, WATERSHIP DOWN is an emotionally arresting, dark-toned allegory about freedom amid political turmoil.
7.2
How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie HOUSE (HAUSU)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of “Scooby-Doo” as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other ghoulish visions, all realized by Obayashi via mattes, animation, and collage effects. Equally absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years.
8.4
Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU), the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel “King’s Ransom,” Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
8.2
Director Stanley Kubrick rips the skin from the face of war to expose the dehumanizing effect of the military on the people fed into its meat grinder in this lacerating and darkly comic journey through a human-made hell. Through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old recruit (Matthew Modine)—from his first days in the Marine Corps boot camp as his superiors try to strip of him his individuality and re-create him as a Marine, to the horrors of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam—FULL METAL JACKET examines the damage war inflicts on the collective human soul with a cutting irony and terrifying intensity that few films have matched.
6.5
Léa Seydoux stars in this visually audacious, mind-bending epic as a woman who falls in love with the same man (George MacKay) across three different incarnations of their lives: in belle-epoque Paris, in contemporary Los Angeles, and in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Inspired by Henry James’s novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” the latest film from Bertrand Bonello (SAINT LAURENT, NOCTURAMA) is a haunting mystery suffused with mounting dread.
7.7
The brilliant and controversial NAKED, from director Mike Leigh, stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself around London on a nocturnal odyssey, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh’s depiction of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
7.6
“Sadiq is not lecturing us or trading in types; he is taking us by sensory surprise, and the tale that he tells is funny, forward, and sometimes woundingly sad.” —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
6.7
SCARFACE costars Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer reunited for this tender and witty tale of unlikely romance adapted by theater legend Terrence McNally from his own play. Frankie (Pfeiffer) is a waitress at a New York City coffee shop who, after a series of hurtful relationships, has become wary of love. Johnny (Pacino) is a just-out-of-prison ex-con attempting to make a fresh start working at the same cafe. Together the pair forge a tentative connection as they confront their respective emotional wounds.
7.1
In the late 19th century, a young Danish priest travels to a remote part of Iceland to build a church and photograph its people. But the deeper he goes into the unforgiving landscape, the more he strays from his purpose, the mission and morality.
7.4
A Chinese American lesbian (Michelle Krusiec) living in New York finds her love life severely cramped when her widowed, unexpectedly pregnant mother is forced to move in with her. Boasting a scene-stealing performance from Joan Chen as the old-school matriarch, this wonderfully warm, witty romantic comedy from Alice Wu offers a slyly perceptive, culturally specific look at Chinese American family values and what it means to both honor and break with tradition.
7
In a secluded, snowy mountain village, widower and single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) leads a modest life gathering water, wood, and wild wasabi for a friend’s udon shop. Yet this peaceful existence is threatened when a pair of corporate reps (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani) arrive to launch a glamping site, sparking resistance from community members who fear the project’s potentially pernicious impact on the environment. When Takumi—a respected local figure—is offered the conciliatory role of site caretaker, it becomes unclear where his loyalties lie. EVIL DOES NOT EXIST, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s much-anticipated follow-up to his Academy Award–winning DRIVE MY CAR, is a haunting, suspenseful meditation on humankind’s thorny relationship with nature, consumerism, and itself. Inspired by a collaboration with composer Eiko Ishibashi, the director showcases his masterful command of pacing and atmosphere to uncover the destructive forces lurking beneath the thin veneer of civilization.
6.2
This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczyńska’s imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” in which the girls’ bond is tested and their survival threatened after one sister falls for a human. A coming-of-age fairy tale with a catchy synth-fueled soundtrack, outrageous song-and-dance numbers, and lavishly grimy sets, THE LURE explores its themes of emerging female sexuality, exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with savage energy and originality.
