Forced to decide whether she will spend her afterlife with her first husband who died young or her long-term second husband, Joan confronts a romantic dilemma of existential proportions, as Eternity guides her through a whimsical, post-mortem plane of bureaucratic order and commodified paradises.
More than simply rendering Chinese folklore as large-scale spectacle, Ne Zha 2 fully internalises the philosophical traditions underpinning that ancient, metaphysical mythology, observing transcendence emerge through self-realisation rather than moral division.
Childhood may seem like an endless kingdom of wonder in Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, fantastically shifting with the vivid imagination of its young protagonist, yet so too does the inevitable discovery of its own transience awaken a soft, bittersweet sorrow.
If celebrity is a cult in this modern media landscape, then veteran pop star Moretti crowns himself its messiah in Opus, as Mark Anthony Green illustrates a corrosive symbiosis between stardom and media that sustains its own self-perpetuating spectacle of power.
The downfall of a narcissistic art thief in The Mastermind is not a dramatic collapse, but rather a desolate drift towards the inevitable, as Kelly Reichardt precipitates a chain of repercussions that pull him back to an unstable reality he has long sought to ignore.
Through one young assassin’s pursuit of vengeance against a cult, Len Wiseman offers a worthy addition to the John Wick franchise in Ballerina, reframing its world of contractual violence as a system to be navigated rather than escaped.
As one young woman falls into the resentful, fugue-like state of motherhood in Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay frays the boundaries of selfhood and domestic routine, casting her portrait of postpartum unravelling in pale greens and fragmented rhythms.
Through Lav Diaz’s rigorously composed tableaux stretching from Portugal to Indonesia, Magellan deconstructs the mythology of its infamous explorer, applying an austere, postcolonial lens to the hubris which underlies such violent acts of conquest.
Dragging us through dust, heat, and excruciating tension of the Moroccan desert, Sirāt navigates one man’s attempts to find his daughter within its hallucinatory rave culture, relentlessly pushing him ever closer to the brink of his own physical and psychological limits.
Hell is a condition of being for souls lost to compulsion in Ballad of a Small Player, and one that Edward Berger blurs into a gilded convergence of superstition, lighting up the global gambling capital as a dazzling, ghostly underworld of endless consumption.
