When Brazil’s plague of forced disappearances reaches a beloved father in I’m Still Here, it is up to his resilient wife to keep the shattered pieces of her family’s lives together, transforming her sorrow and trauma into a testament of selfless, compassionate resistance.
Opera singer Maria Callas’ astonishing talent is both her greatest gift and curse in Pablo Larraín’s impressionistic, melancholy biopic, simultaneously giving her reason to live and eroding her tormented soul as she wanders through the final week of her extraordinary life.
Jacques Audiard is no hack, and there is some merit to the outlandish ambition of this pulpy, musical melodrama about a cartel kingpin’s transition, yet its constant misfires keep Emilia Pérez from ever settling on a coherent direction.
The unity of art and politics was not exactly a new concept in the 1960s, but Bob Dylan’s refreshing brand of celebrity that is both radically outspoken and mysteriously private inspires awe in A Complete Unknown, soulfully capturing the countercultural icon’s elusive, inscrutable essence.
As we traverse Brady Corbet’s epic saga of a Hungarian-Jewish architect forging a new life, his ties to both America and his homeland intertwine, yielding complex artistic fusions born of bitter nostalgia, soured dreams, and deep-seated cultural trauma.
What unfolds behind the closed doors of the Sistine Chapel in the wake of a pope’s death makes for a tantalising source of intrigue in Conclave, yet Edward Berger brings a solemn gravity to his staging of this suspenseful political thriller, exposing the secrets and moral weaknesses of those who vie for that newly vacant position of power.
The affliction which plagues one mild-mannered train driver with bouts of rage might as well be a blood curse in La Bete Humaine, and fate does not look kindly on those who tempt the beast, as Jean Renoir delicately lays out the blueprint of corrupted antiheroes and femme fatales in his tragic fable of man’s inner madness.
Sean Baker captures the whirlwind marriage between a New York stripper and wealthy Russian bachelor with spontaneous realism in Anora, colliding two worlds in euphoric, chaotic romance, and dragging it through the disenchantment of even messier heartbreak.
Count Orlok’s carnal voraciousness is more heightened than ever in Robert Eggers’ meticulously handsome remake of Nosferatu, underscoring the shameful, psychosexual desire which exposes each character to the vampire’s disturbing pull, and manifesting an archaic horror that feeds on our guilty hearts.
John Ford’s sentimental mythologising cannot be criticised for a lack of rousing sincerity in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, commemorating the dutiful perseverance of one Old West cavalry troop seeking peaceful resolution to a historic conflict, and basking in the vibrant majesty of the rugged American wilderness.
