It takes more than brute strength to defeat a creature as viciously powerful as a Predator, and as Dan Trachtenberg studies history’s greatest warriors through Viking battles, samurai duels, and modern warfare, Killer of Killers honours the resilient heart of a people born to survive.
The tragedy of innocence persevering through historical turmoil underpins the vulnerable heart of Orphan, as through László Nemes’ intimate, subjective camerawork, one young boy grapples with the dissonance between an imagined father and reality in postwar Budapest.
Far from mythologising Mark Kerr’s contributions to mixed martial arts, Benny Safdie treats his body as both an instrument and casualty of the sport’s formation in The Smashing Machine, illustrating its personal cost in intensely tactile, psychological terms.
Through Mary Bronstein’s harrowing focus on motherhood as a state of constant triage, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You directs its anxiety-inducing tension toward a woman stretched to her limits, underscoring the unbearable guilt, crushing responsibility, and relentless pressure that saturates mundane anxieties.
Confined to an emergency call centre, The Voice of Hind Rajab narrows in on the conversations between dispatch personnel and a young girl trapped in the Israeli assault on Gaza, using authentic audio recordings to anchor its dramatisation within a procedural, visceral reality.
The kinetic choreography which fuses dance and combat in KPop Demon Hunters certainly impresses, yet music transcends spectacle in this vibrant, neon-soaked world of idols turned warriors, liberating performers and fans alike from those inner voices that gnaw at self-worth.
Kleber Mendonça Filho sets a vast stage for the tense political drama of The Secret Agent, tracing one dissident’s attempts to outmanoeuvre Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, and studying historic expressions of grief and resistance distorted by its cruel, bureaucratic censorship.
Bi Gan’s metamodern autopsy of cinema may be elusive in its dreamlike passage through time, yet in becoming one of the medium’s most transcendent accomplishments in recent years, Resurrection enacts the intersection of art and reality as a transient, bittersweet exchange.
Table tennis superstar Marty Mauser is unlikeable a sports movie antihero as they come, and through Josh Safdie’s abrasive illustration of a self-serving quest for glory, Marty Supreme propels his morally dubious ventures forward on waves of frantic, pulsating momentum.
Richard Linklater sensitively bares the lonely, eccentric soul of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, locating him on the opening night of his old creative partner’s newest hit, and tracing the heartbreak, jealousy, and self-sabotage that send him spiralling towards oblivion.
