2010s

The three days we spend within freshman Jake’s microcosmic college bubble seems to stretch out in eternal bliss, a period which Richard Linklater delights in with richly defined characters lightly treading the line between hedonism and intellectualism, evolving Everybody Wants Some!! into an unhurried study of Generation X masculinity in all its youthful idealism.

Wong Kar-wai has rarely indulged so much in the fierceness of action cinema as he does here in the story of legendary martial artist Ip Man, and yet the delicate attention to detail in his slow-motion cinematography and elegant choreography also ties The Grandmaster to the lyrical style that he has spent decades honing with…

Mountains May Depart marks Jia Zhangke’s most significant withdrawal from his distinctive, neorealist style, and although the film is a little weaker for it, he still finds a deep poignancy in the widening generation gap separating China’s past from its future.

Lynne Ramsay is far more interested in creating an impressionistic sense of a lonely, disorientated mind out of hypnotic montages than she is in plot in You Were Never Really Here, building ambient rhythms that draw us into the fragmented nightmares of a violent man tasked with rescuing young girls from traffickers.

Four loosely connected episodes of violence based on real Chinese news stories come together in a Touch of Sin to sketch out a landscape of anger and frustration, as Jia Zhangke pushes the boundaries of his usual neo-realistic style until they start to overlap with traditional crime thriller conventions.