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Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
No single image in Songs from the Second Floor reveals the full scope of eternal traffic jams, nonsense bureaucracy, and apocalyptic senselessness that this city has descended into, but as Roy Andersson’s painterly tableaux come together with deadpan melancholy, so too does his landscape of surreal, urban decay take absurdist form.
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Juror #2 (2024)
When a man serving on a jury recognises his own unexpected culpability in Juror #2, moral turmoil begins to stir his conscience, offering a rich subject for Clint Eastwood’s study of stifled, agonising guilt.
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Sinners (2025)
Music is a supernatural force that can pierce the veil between life and death in Sinners, and it is through its bluesy harmonies that Ryan Coogler resonates a timeless riff between warring cultural ideals, setting one 1930s African American juke joint against an insidious band of vampires.
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A Serious Man (2009)
The perpetual misfortunes that plague one Jewish professor in A Serious Man often seem like the setup for a joke with no punchline, damning him to an ungratifying search for life’s answers through both science and faith, and thereby delivering one of the Coen Brothers’ most enigmatic, ironic works.
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Queer (2024)
Through the colourful, layered motifs that Luca Guadagnino weaves through the life of American expat William Lee, Queer delivers an unflinching fever dream that denies easy answers to his internal contradictions, constantly unravelling his capacity for love by his fear of being seen.
