7.5
The former famous painter Frenhofer revisits an abandoned project using the girlfriend of a young visiting artist. Questions about truth, life, and artistic limits are explored.
7.4
The Belgian filmmaking team of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne turned heads with ROSETTA, an intense vérité drama that closely follows a poor young woman struggling to hold on to a job to support herself and her alcoholic mother. It’s a swift and simple tale made revelatory by the raw, empathetic way in which the directors render Rosetta’s desperation, keeping the camera nearly perched on her shoulder throughout. Many have copied the Dardennes’ style, but few have equaled it. This ferocious film won big at Cannes, earning the Palme d’Or for the filmmakers and the best actress prize for the indomitable Émilie Dequenne.
6.6
A couple retreat to the island that inspired Ingmar Bergman to write screenplays for their upcoming films when the lines between reality and fiction start to blur.
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.
7.7
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.
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.
7.1
With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching À NOS AMOURS is one of his greatest achievements. In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À NOS AMOURS is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.
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.
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.
7.6
“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
7.5
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s arresting international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of an emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, seemingly unmotivated murders—each committed by a different person yet all bearing the same grisly hallmarks—leads Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) into a labyrinthine investigation to discover what connects them, and into a disturbing game of cat and mouse with an enigmatic amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara) who may be evil incarnate. Awash in hushed, hypnotic dread, CURE is a tour de force of psychological tension and a hallucinatory journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind.
7.4
The contemporary American auteur Michael Mann’s bold artistic sensibility was already fully formed when he burst out of the gate with THIEF, his debut feature. James Caan stars, in one of his most riveting performances, as a no-nonsense ex-con safecracker planning to leave the criminal world behind after one final diamond heist—but he discovers that escape is not as simple as he’d hoped. Finding hypnotic beauty in neon and rain-slick streets, sparks and steel, THIEF effortlessly established the moody stylishness and tactile approach to action that would also define such later iconic entertainments from Mann as MIAMI VICE, MANHUNTER, and HEAT.
7.4
With AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Jane Campion brought to the screen the harrowing autobiography of Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished author. Three actors in turn take on the lead role (including Kerry Fox in a marvelous performance as the adult Frame), as the film describes a journey from an impoverished childhood marked by tragedy to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia resulting in electroshock therapy and a narrowly escaped lobotomy to, finally, international literary fame. Unobtrusively capturing the beauty and power of the New Zealand landscape while maintaining the film’s focus on the figure at its center, Campion broke new ground for female filmmakers everywhere and earned a sweep of her country’s film awards, along with the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
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.
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.
7.4
With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at its most offbeat. Jarmusch follows rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and his visiting sixteen-year-old cousin, Eva (Eszter Balint), as they drift from New York’s Lower East Side to the snowy expanses of Lake Erie and the drab beaches of Florida, always managing to make the least of wherever they end up. Structured as a series of master-shot vignettes etched in black and white by cinematographer Tom DiCillo, STRANGER THAN PARADISE is a nonchalant masterpiece of deadpan comedy and perfectly calibrated minimalism.
6.6
In a dystopian future, Japan’s government launches Plan 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic burdens. In Chie Hayakawa’s remarkable and sensitive feature debut, the lives of three ordinary citizens—an elderly woman no longer able to live independently (the legendary Chieko Baisho, in a moving late-career performance), an initially eager Plan 75 salesman (Hayato Isomura), and an immigrant care worker (Stephanie Arianne)—intersect in this new reality as they confront the crushing callousness of a world ready to dispose of those no longer deemed valuable. Hayakawa’s view is far from grim, however, as these characters soon learn to fully reckon with their own lives and what it truly means to live.
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.
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.
7.7
In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also cowrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ remains a unique work in cinema history.
7.5
A master of intensely emotional human dramas, director Lee Chang-dong is a luminary of contemporary Korean cinema, and his place on the international stage was cemented by this stirring and unpredictable work examining grief and deliverance. An effortless mix of lightness and uncompromising darkness, SECRET SUNSHINE stars Cannes best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon as a widowed piano teacher who moves with her young son from Seoul to her late husband’s provincial hometown for a fresh start. Quietly expressive, supple filmmaking and sublime, subtle performances distinguish this remarkable portrayal of the search for grace amid tragedy.
7.1
In this exquisitely calibrated film, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay perform a subtly off-kilter pas de deux as Kate and Geoff, an English couple who, on the eve of an anniversary celebration, find their long marriage shaken by the arrival of a letter to Geoff that unceremoniously collapses his past into their shared present. Director Andrew Haigh carries the tradition of British realist cinema to artful new heights in 45 YEARS, weaving the momentous into the mundane as the pair go about their daily lives, while the evocatively flat, wintry Norfolk landscape frames their struggle to maintain an increasingly untenable status quo. Loosely adapting a short story by David Constantine, Haigh shifts the focus from the slightly erratic Geoff to Kate, eliciting a remarkable, nuanced portrayal by Rampling of a woman’s gradual metamorphosis from unflappable wife to woman undone.
7.7
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux's animated marvel FANTASTIC PLANET, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags' oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.
8.1
The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.
