Mussolini: Son of the Century [2025]

 It often takes distance to relook at an infamous tyrant’s hideous rise, along with the toxic idea of fascism (or its codification, to be more appropriate), and that’s what one senses while watching the biopic miniseries on Benito Mussolini’s surge from a relative nobody to two decades’ reign as an ultra-right-wing dictator of Italy. Adapted from Antonio Scurati’s novel, this was directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright – best known for his fine 2007 film Atonement and having never made anything outside the English language, leave alone in Italian – and produced while conscious that populist right-wing nationalism has once again been raising its ugly head across continental Europe, including in Italy. The brutal, power-hungry and self-serving strongman’s ascent – from founding the ‘Fasci Italiani di Combattimento’ in 1919 and stoking pent-up frustrations from WW1, through establishing the savage ‘Blackshirts’ militia, exponential growth in political clout and snatching the Prime Ministerial chair, and up until the cynical assassination of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti by his bloodthirsty thugs in 1924, culminating with a chilling speech in the Parliament on 3^rd January 1925 which effectively signalled the advent of totalitarianism – has been presented in the form of a punk, stylized and tar black satire that made it a volatile fusion of political history with gleeful formal experimentation, punched with the ethos and machinations of a gangster movie. The deliberately grotesque, hideous, hyper-violent and vulgar tone and palette – composed with compelling exactitude over 8 episodes of an hour each – were accompanied by a techno score, contemporary self-awareness, and a fiery – and frequently fourth-wall breaching – performance by Luca Marinelli as the smug, insecure, uncouth, self-serving and cunning despot who embodied the absolute corruptibility of absolute power.

Director: Joe Wright

Genre: Biopic/Black Comedy/Historical Drama/Political Satire/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You [2025]

 Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s wackily titled film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – her first feature direction in 17 years which she shot over just 27 days, including two additional ones by trading her director’s fee – began on a dry note with Linda (Rose Byrne) grudgingly agreeing with her daughter’s remark that “Mommy is stretchable”. However, as physics teaches us, nothing is indefinitely stretchable, and an over-stretched object inevitably snaps. The woman is already simmering with nerve-racking anxieties and teetering on the edges, having to care for an overdependent daughter with a mysterious feeding problem that necessitates difficult medical arrangements, and do so helplessly alone due to a perennially absent husband who keeps alluding to conventional gender roles, while also managing her own job, dealing with a damaged apartment, and indefinite relocation to a shabby motel. As a result, it doesn’t take much for her to unravel, and which Byrne portrayed with aplomb. The movie was claustrophobic, tense and distressing, but it was also oftentimes darkly funny and borderline unhinged. Linda, despite being a spiralling trainwreck, is ironically a psychiatrist herself, who – further ironically – takes psychiatric help from her colleague (Conan O’Brien) with whom she shares a passive-aggressive relationship. Additionally, she must continuously engage with people who keep getting on her frazzled nerves – a supremely irritating motel receptionist, a pedantic parking guard, and a couple of overbearing patients, including a teenaged guy who’s physically besotted with her. The script, unfortunately, felt overloaded at times, a serial embodiment of Murphy’s Law, and tad heavy on metaphors; a lighter-footed approach might’ve better complemented the emotional battleground. This, was, nevertheless, a gusty work that courageously navigated through motherhood at its most strained.

Director: Mary Bronstein

Genre: Psychological Drama/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: US

The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station / Berlin Hero [2025]

 Like his much-loved 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker crafted a playful tragicomedy – recalling East Germany, which disappeared from the map upon reunification with West Germany, using an absurdist and gently satirical lens – with The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station. However, while the former was set as the wall was coming down, Becker’s final, posthumously released film – adapted from Maxim Leo’s novel – looks into that thirty years later through the porous devices of memory and history. The film’s middle-aged Berliner protagonist Micha (Charly Hübner), who runs a struggling video store, is “discovered” by an opportunist journalist (Leon Ullrich) – looking to write a career-defining article while commemorating the 30^th anniversary of the Wall’s fall – as the mastermind behind a “mass escape” from the erstwhile GDR in 1984. No matter that it was an honest mistake by the then callow railway worker in East Berlin that’d inadvertently rerouted an S-Bahn carrying 127 passengers to West Berlin, and that everyone barring 2 had returned, as who’d want truth to come in the way of a great story – especially one that goes well with how the former Communist country is remembered today in mass media and popular cultural memory. Though uncomfortable with the half-truths and lies that get spun, he starts enjoying being a media sensation. Things, however, are complicated when he finds himself falling for a woman (Christiane Paul) who happened to be one of the 2 people who’d stayed, and former dissident Herald (Thorsten Merten) starts digging into the story. The endearing and vibrantly composed film had moments of ironic humour, as when Herald subverts expectations by praising aspects of East German life that today’s consumerist Germany finds impossible to accept.

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Genre: Comedy/Political Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: German

Country: Germany

Nouvelle Vague [2025]

 Richard Linklater composed Nouvelle Vague as a love letter to the eponymous French movement and Jean-Luc Godard’s trailblazing genius through a quirky, breezy and enjoyable “behind-the-scenes” making of JLG’s seminal debut feature Breathless. The latter film, with the way it embodied radical creative freedom – in its conception, making, expression and all-round irreverence – became the movement’s most emblematic work, and Linklater’s ode was therefore also a gushing celebration of movies itself. Shaped like a picaresque caper, it began with The 400 Blows’ rapturous Cannes screening, the unforgettable debut of Godard’s friend and fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Truffaut. With most others belonging to Cahiers’ pioneering cohort having made feature debuts already, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) decides it’s high time for him to jump from theory to action. He hustles a meagre budget from producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), somehow lures Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) – fresh out of her success with Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse – into the cast, and pulls in his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), largely unknown at that time, as the Bogart-admiring anti-hero. Former war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who’d become a Nouvelle Vague legend himself, joins the crew, and thus begins a whirlwind and hilariously unpredictable 20-day shoot when Godard fought with Beauregard, annoyed Seberg, broke every cinematic grammar, charmed everyone and created history, while proving to be alternately mercurial, infuriating, enigmatic, wryly funny and inspired, uttering pithy philosophies and advised by his zen gurus Rosellini, Melville and Bresson. Despite its fleeting qualities, playfulness and verisimilitude – gorgeous B/W photography on 35mm film, digital recreation of 1960s Paris, and made fully in French – Linklater’s approach, ironically, stood at odds with Godard’s guerrilla, improvisational and political filmmaking.

Director: Richard Linklater

Genre: Comedy/Docudrama

Language: French

Country: France

What Does That Nature Say to You [2025]

 Lengthy alcohol-soaked interactions – as speeches slur, conversations digress, inhibitions get lowered, and anxieties, fissures and disappointments get subtly exposed – have defined Hong Sang-soo’s droll, observational slices of life. The pivotal sequence that his seriocomic 33^rd feature gradually builds towards is also an inebriated gathering where banal discussions, albeit with simmering undercurrents, transition into an edgy meltdown and disapproving opinions. Passing the “alcohol test” was therefore a crucial consideration in his amusing take on the “meet the parents” premise; however, that said, in his delectably mellow and understated world – where life plays in a minor key – confrontations and judgements are both transient and quickly forgotten. Ha (Ha Seong-guk), a thirty-something amateur poet who’s detached ties with his wealthy and influential father in order to pursue beauty shorn of societal chains, is invited by his girlfriend (Kang So-yi) of three years – who’s come to accept his quirky lifestyle choices – into her parents’ sprawling hilltop home. Her family, however, may not be as understanding, despite their outwardly genial natures. The father (the wonderful HSS regular Kwon Hae-hyo) disarmingly engages Ha in rambling banter – trying his antiquated car, showing him around, egging him to bond with the family, and finally sloshing him with makgeolli –; the discerning mother (Cho Yun-hee), a poet herself who gets Ha to open up about his poetry skills; and the sister (Park Mi-so), supposedly battling depression, steadily needling him about his privilege that’s at odds with his romanticized desire for the life of a starving artist. In a quirky formal choice, the typically unadorned visuals in the customary long takes became hazy on occasions, complementing Ha’s frequent avoidance of glasses in his preference for blurry vision of things.

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: Korean

Country: South Korea

The Piano Accident [2025]

 In a hyperconnected digital world overstuffed with vacuous “influencers” spewing inane garbage in the name of content, and their rabid “followers” ravenously consuming them, one can only be bemused by this weirdly symbiotic relationship. Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident is a pungent and jaundiced satire that ferociously interrogates this greasy and desolate state of affair. It’s, in other words, a rather savage little film that goes for the jugular and takes no prisoners. It begins with a teasing shot of a piano suspended midair before seemingly crashing down. We then see Magalie (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a cantankerous young woman with a fractured arm – ostensibly injured by the said incident – being driven to a luxurious getaway by her servile factotum Patrick (Jérôme Commandeur). As we gradually learn, she’s an insanely popular and super-wealthy social media sensation who creates bizarre content – freely milking her congenital insensitivity to pain for masochistic reels – that her fans consume like a drug, and that she’s currently escaping from a shocking turn of events which can permanently ruin her. This is a curiously minimalist work in terms of its cast; aside from the incorrigible Magalie – whose utterly repulsive behaviour is a defence against her rotten and empty core, and delightfully hammed up by Exarchopoulos – we have the middle-aged Patrick, who satisfies all her churlish demands while secretly despising her as he’s unlikely get such a well-paying job elsewhere; Simone (Sandrine Kiberlain), a desperate journalist who blackmails her way into a candid interview with the notoriously media averse celeb; and a salivating idiot (Karim Leklou) representing toxic, dim-witted fandom. The film gleefully deals in unrestrained excesses with a sense of humour that’s equal parts grotesque, horrifying and unhinged.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France

La Grazia (Grace) [2025]

 Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, on paper, shouldn’t work, as at its most elemental it’s about a white, ageing, well-off, conservative, heteronormative man in a position of power and beset with moral dilemmas, religious inhibitions and political indecisiveness. It, however, harboured a mischievous coexistence of austere tones and solemn themes with punkish undercurrents and a subversive streak, and this interplay between seemingly incongruous elements made this a surprisingly enthralling experience. Predominantly an exercise in narrative minimalism and weighty themes, it comprised of exquisitely restrained performances by a small cast led by an exceptional Toni Servillo as fictitious Italian president and renowned former jurist Mariano De Santis (incidentally, he played real-life Italian premiers twice in earlier Sorrentino films); judicial debates with his exasperated lawyer-daughter (Anna Ferzetti); mulling on a new bill legalizing euthanasia awaiting his ratification and proposed presidential pardons for two people in jail for having committed murders (Linda Messerkliger was especially riveting as a striking woman who’s brutally killed her abusive husband); being haunted by the memories of his dead wife who he loved immensely, while also consumed by her infidelity from four decades back; and ample moments of silent introspection, solitary smokes and inaction. Further, set mostly inside the Quirinal Palace, its grand visual compositions were dominated by vast, empty spaces. In parallel, it occasionally cut loose with idiosyncratic bursts – a Rastafarian, moped-riding Pope; an electrifying contemporary dance sequence that reminded me of Pablo Larraín’s dazzling film Ema; a disastrous walk through torrential rains by a superannuated Portuguese President, shot in stylized slo-mo; acerbic jabs by Mariano’s close friend and nonconformist art critic (Milvia Marigliano); sardonic undertones frequently cloaking the melancholic airs; and a terrific, sparingly-used techno score.

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Once Upon a Time in Gaza [2025]

 Directed by Nasser Brothers – identical Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab – Once Upon A Time in Gaza is what the seemingly hackneyed title suggests, viz. a wacky potpourri of politics and meta-references. It’s made in the veins of a revisionist Western – populated with crooked characters, crumbling moralities, wry ironies, stylized dynamics, grimy landscapes and random violence – and set in the titular city which has been under a draconian siege for decades. It’s particularly shaped by the brothers’ intent in capturing life – with its idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and arbitrariness – beyond the blockade, apartheid and genocide that informed its backdrop, and strongly recalled the great Elia Suleiman’s films. Divided into two disparate halves, the first was led by Osama (Majd Eid), a gregarious and amoral hustler who runs a small falafel outlet and peddles in smuggled painkillers on the side; he employs the unassuming Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), and faces a deadly face-off with Abou (Ramzi Maqdisi), a nasty cop wanting a pie of the drug trade. The focus shifts to Yahya in the second half where, traumatized by Osama’s murder by Abou (who’s now grown in power), he’s offered to star as a martyred revolutionary in an agitprop action film sponsored by Gaza’s Ministry of Culture. Though the two halves felt disjointed – sardonic slice-of-life followed by deliberately self-reflexive events – they together carried a free interpretation of the good, the bad and the ugly personas from Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti Western. Majid was captivating, as were the grubby locales, subaltern subtext and deadpan humour. Filmed in Jordan by the exiled brothers, it also featured snippets from the subversive, over-the-top movie-within-movie, and operatically-scored funeral processions that nodded at Kalatozov ‘s magnificent I Am Cuba.

Director: Tarzan & Arab Nasser

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Crime Thriller/Buddy Film/Neo-Western/Action

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

Bugonia [2025]

 Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist and unhinged black comedies have toggled between relatively minimalist palettes and unreservedly maximalist ones. Bugonia was primarily constructed in the former vein – seething with anxiety, paranoia, gallows humour, and satire on class warfare, corporate malfeasance and exploitation – and soared for stretches with the unsettling ferocity and straight-faced schlock of his dystopian parable The Lobster. However, unlike that earlier film, it instead ended up literalizing the plot, delivering philosophical explanations and veering towards grandiose tendencies in the final third leading to the “extraterrestrial” climax. That jump into fantasy partially offset the tense and edgy buildup, even if it ultimately closed with a fine montage accompanied by Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of the great Pete Seeger folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”. Remade from the Korean film Save the Green Planet!, it follows two marginalized and alienated guys – conspiracy theory-obsessed Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) – who kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of a powerful pharmaceutical company, assuming her to be an alien (“Andromedan”) secretly here in human form to destroy earthlings and its ecology. At its heart lay the psychological duel between the cold, manipulative and sociopathic Michelle, with her doublespeak, consulting jargon, and frightening lack of empathy, and Teddy, whose grief, past trauma, and emotional estrangement – complemented by his intelligence and detestation for the neoliberal monstrosity that the pharma company represents – has transitioned into volatile and destructive monomania. Stone was riveting, and Plemons no less compelling, in embodying their characters, while Delbis was quietly affecting as the tragically lost and fragile Don, in this bleak and unsparing work that stopped short of brilliance due to Lanthimos’ inability to pull back.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Black Comedy/Thriller/Social Satire/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: UK

Dracula [2025]

 Romanian provocateur and lampooner Radu Jude’s Dracula – his second outing in 2025 after Kontinental '25, both shot using iPhones – was a profane dissection of Romania’s most famous export, ferocious depiction of how troubling historical events are appropriated by consumerist societies into kitschy money-spinners, and lurid commentary on the blood-sucking vampirism of AI in cinema (and arts in general). After the relatively more restrained (though no less cutting) last film, Jude returned to his maximalist ways – and further amped up his preferred episodic form – in this unhinged and outrageous work that was a brutal parody, farce, burlesque, satire and critique rolled into one. Comprising of multiple chapters of disparate lengths and tones over a three-hour length and connected by a linked narrative, the film felt uneven and overdone on occasions, while unabashedly delivering a riotous potpourri of politics, history, sex, violence, comedy, metatextual referentiality, societal takedowns, celebration of lowbrow aesthetics, and chaotic experimentation. A gleefully vulgar filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) wants to make a commercial movie on Bram Stoker’s eponymous creation (which had been inspired from the 15^th century ruler Vlad the Impaler, who’d meted out savage punishments to his opponents and is a hero for ultra-right-wing nationalists), but is creatively blocked. He therefore makes use of LLM prompts for a series of gratuitous reimaginations. They include a smutty, Dracula-themed cabaret that allows tourists to engage in carnal and violent roleplays; a sham health centre summoning the Count for psychosomatic treatments; a Dracula reincarnate outraged by his bastardization to hapless visitors; Vlad calling his ghouls to viciously break a defiant union strike; and a PhD student falling for an aristocrat’s daughter in a town haunted by a vampire, amidst religious frenzy.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Experimental Film/Anthology Film

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

Father Mother Sister Brother [2025]

 Father Mother Sister Brother – Jim Jarmusch’s fourth anthology film, a form that he keeps returning to – was interwoven with his love for aimless drifters, low-key emotions, deadpan humour, and loosely-strung stories that don’t reveal any big truths. The overarching theme of this gently idiosyncratic and curiously compelling triptych was the unknowability of the inner workings of one’s parents and a Rorschach test on defining familial relationships through one’s subjective interpretations. In the wryly funny and ironic first episode, “Father”, carrying delectable traits of O’Henry and Maupassant, siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their aged, reclusive, widowed and estranged dad (Tom Waits) who stays in remote New Jersey; while they wonder how their father survives with no social security, and his dishevelled cabin confirms their doubts, there’s something brewing underneath which delightfully comes to the fore eventually; the father’s nonconformist existence (which Waits channelled naturally) made for an amusing contrast to his children who’re squares. In the relatively weaker middle chapter “Mother”, the scenario is reversed as two neurotic sisters – the uptight Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and the oddball Lilith (Vicky Krieps) – visit their successful, self-assured mom (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin, for a rather stiff-collared annual reunion. In the wistful and glorious final chapter “Sister Brother”, that saw Jarmusch operating in commanding form, American-Parisians and fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) reconnect over the melancholic memories of their bohemian parents – who’ve recently died – over coffee, old photos, their parents’ emptied apartment, and final belongings; it featured a cameo by the legendary Françoise Lebrun. The film featured Dusty Springfield’s seductive song ‘Spooky’, Anika’s haunting rendition of it, oddball connecting threads, and carefree skateboarders representing subaltern freedom.

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Genre: Comedy/Family Drama/Anthology Film

Language: English

Country: US

Kontinental '25 [2025]

 Coming on the back of his two provocative and coruscating stunners Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 felt decidedly contemplative in comparison, even if a relatively toned-down Radu Jude film too leaves one with a pungent aftertaste through cutting satire, caustic jabs and gallows humour. This was a sharp assault – carried out using a disarmingly gentle-looking scalpel – on the crushing and callous apathy of post-Communist, neoliberal Romania, marked by dismantling of social safety nets for the marginalized and vulnerable, escalating housing crises, rabid gentrification, toxic ethno-nationalism, and perhaps most ironically, the outsourcing of guilt. The film’s deliberately cheesy protagonist, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff of Hungarian ethnicity, evicts a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) – displaying disingenuous sympathy while arriving with intimidating bouncer-cops – from the unused boiler room of a building that’s set to be turned into a boutique hotel by a German company. That, tragically, incites the man into committing suicide, and as a result she’s plagued by a heavy outpouring of guilt, which she sobbingly unloads – over a series of deadpan conversations – onto her husband, boss, friend, mom, punkish former student, and priest, while also clarifying each tine that she wasn’t legally culpable. Jude’s scalding portrayal of inbred racism was nonpartisan; Orsolya’s cantankerous mom curses Romanians for stealing Transylvania from Hungary and for being lazy, while her Romanian husband chuckle while reading through the brazenly bigoted trolling in social media targeting her ethnicity. The film, incidentally, opened with a 20-minute near-wordless montage where we follow the soon-to-be-dead “non-person” through the city, while scoffing at the over-abundance of urban kitsch, from robot dogs to plastic dinosaurs.

Director: Radu Jude

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Romanian/Hungarian

Country: Romania

No Other Choice [2025]

 Park Chan-wook’s filmography is replete with wickedly feral killers who complement method with madness. No Other Choice’s anti-hero, conversely, was ridiculously inept at murder despite being naturally drawn to it, thus making this an interesting entry in his canon. Adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Axe – previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, and which Park had wanted to make since long – it drips with liberal doses of farce, satire, cutting humour, chaotic violence, and an exceptionally jaundiced view of a broken, hyper-capitalist society. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) – a veteran in the paper industry who’s loyally been with the same organization for twenty-five years – is a model citizen with a beautiful wife (Son Ye-jin), an ancestral home that he’s painstakingly reinstated, and heteronormative ideals. His amusingly bland life comes crashing down when, upon a takeover by Americans relentlessly driven by automation and efficiency, he – along with many others – are summarily “axed”. The new bosses supposedly have no other choice, and in turn Man-su becomes convinced that he too has none but to bump off his competition – former colleagues similarly struggling with crushing unemployment – to secure a prized job opening. In another movie, he would’ve been the wronged guy forced by desperate circumstances; however, in Park’s world of controlled malice and moral dystopia, Man-su – like his bosses – always had other choices that were nullified by his class trappings and “killer instincts”, while “cut-throat” competition conveniently justify murderous ends. Powered by a compelling turn by Lee (reuniting with Park twenty-five years after Joint Security Area), a fine supporting act by Son, and Park’s love for gorgeous and meticulously designed visuals, the film was sad, crazy, grisly, bitter and funny, despite its deliberate silliness and excesses.

Director: Park Chan-wook

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Crime Thriller

Language: Korean

Country: South Korean

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

 The Hawks and the Sparrows ingeniously harboured parallel tracks, as it was both informed by the austere aesthetics and social commitment of neorealist cinema that Pier Paolo Pasolini had a strong background in, and was expressive of the radical, modernist, and asinine aspects of his subsequent filmography. This picaresque road movie, Marxist parable, and darkly funny commentary on social inequality demonstrated that pivot. Its farcical, eccentric and subversive whimsy were evident from the get-go as it began with an amusing song, accompanying the opening title credits and introducing the cast and the crew, including how producer Alfredo Bini might’ve “endangered his position and reputation” by backing this work. An idiosyncratic father-son duo – played by the celebrated thespian Totò as the elderly, droopy-eyed, Chaplinesque dad, and Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and frequent collaborator, as the goofy, curly-haired, skirt-chasing son – are on an ambling walk through the gritty countryside of Rome, albeit going nowhere, and meeting oddball characters and having offbeat encounters along the way. They’re joined in their peregrinations by the Crow, a talking raven and left-wing intellectual. He spouts gentle advices, wry reflections, and philosophical musings, and chronicles an allegorical tale involving two monks (also played by Totò and Davoli) who’re asked by St. Francis – presented as a Marxist cleric keenly conscious of class conflicts, and reminiscent of Pasolini’s celebrated preceding narrative feature The Gospel According to St. Matthew – to preach the gospel to the haughty, powerful hawks and the humble, vulnerable sparrows. Filmed in sparkling B/W and irreverently scored by Ennio Moricone, it interplayed between political satire and dialectical analysis, and contained an homage to just-deceased Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti through a stirring montage of news footage.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Road Movie/Fantasy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Traveller [1974]

 The Traveller, Abbas Kiarostami’s second full-length feature – or first, depending on whether you consider his evocative and poetic preceding work The Experience as one – was an absorbing, madcap and quixotic paean to childhood and adolescence. It was, in turn, the Iranian master’s love letter to a kid’s impudence, exuberance and non-conformism, which’re invariably bound to be heavily frowned upon by adults and viewed as reckless folly and insubordination. What the movies represented for Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s unforgettable The 400 Blows – as much a brewing passion and a beautiful dream as a means for adventure and escape from the dreariness of existence – football played that role for this film’s impish, 12-year-old pint-sized dynamite Qassem (Hassan Darabi). Obsessed with the game, he freely disobeys his desperate parents and dogmatic teachers to play football in the alleys with his buddies. His obsession reaches a state of monomania upon deciding to embark on the seemingly crazy quest to collect enough money to sponsor a trip to Tehran and catch a game of his favourite team at Azadi Stadium. He demonstrates exceptional doggedness, ingenuity and resourcefulness, and freely crosses ethical quandaries to fund his odyssey – including, in arguably the film’s most memorable segment, taking money from kids and their parents by staging a fake photoshoot using a broken camera – with the help of his loyal friend Akbar who truly wants Qassem to succeed. Shot in grainy B/W with a blend of frenetic energy, playful irony and empathy, and with storytelling flair vividly complemented by documentary realism, this was a joyous act of solidarity against stifling impositions and restrictions, while the insouciant, irrepressible and rebellious kid remains an indelible creation in Kiarostami’s oeuvre.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

One Battle After Another [2025]

 Reworked from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – making this his second Pynchon adaptation after Inherent Vice – One Battle After Another was P.T. Anderson at his most thrilling and sardonic. Alternately goofy and gritty, laidback and bristling with urgency, facetious and serious, politically informed and riotously entertaining, the film heavily reminded me of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s radical and anarchic neo-polar comedy-thriller novels; it also bore imprints of the Coens’ insouciant absurdism, and Friedkin and Peckinpah’s muscular actioners, thereby blending elements of left-wing political thrillers (a sub-genre that’s largely vanished) with black comedy, action, chutzpah and rollicking fun. In an extended prologue, we’re introduced to the far-left groupuscule ‘French 75’, that’s led by the fiery revolutionary Perfidia (Teyana Taylor); her boyfriend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), an explosives expert, stands out as a misfit white guy in this outfit engaged in guerilla rebellion against the establishment. During a mission to free detained immigrants, she teasingly humiliates the comically twisted and reactionary military officer Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who becomes fixated on her despite his hatred for back people, while simultaneously massacring the group. 16 years later, Bob is now a washed-out stoner who lives off-the-grid with his feisty teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). His past, however, catches up with him when Lockjaw – wishing to rectify past interracial transgressions to protect his membership in an exclusive white supremacist club where racial purity is sacrosanct – decides to liquidate Willa under the garb of busting illegal immigration. What ensues is pure pandemonium, and an elaborate chase sequence that transitioned from the farcical to the visceral, accompanied by a terrific, jangling score by Jonny Greenwood. The excellent cast also included Benicio del Toro as a deadpan leader of an undocumented community.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Genre: Thriller/Comedy/Political Thriller/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Action

Language: English

Country: US

F for Fake [1973]

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, chicanery and double bluffs – was one final act of wily chutzpah by the man who loved subverting boundaries. Conjoined with Abbas Kiarostami’s late-career masterpiece Certified Copy in their shared admiration for fakes and teasing questions on authenticity, while ironically being ravishingly original works themselves, it operated in the intersection of documentary, essay and hybrid – as it often blurred the lines separating non-fiction from fiction. It primarily focused on two fascinating charlatans who drew Welles to this film in the first place (François Reichenbach had initially planned to direct it, but happily became its producer instead). On one hand there was Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger who fooled renowned art galleries with his fakes thanks to his insouciance and brilliance; now retired, he’s settled at Ibiza where he regales his guests with wry anecdotes. Joining him was Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who then insolently walked in his subject’s footsteps by writing a fake “authorized autobiography” of Howard Hughes. Along with his infectious portraits on the two men – who he treated with undisguised fondness as fellow journeymen – Welles freely deployed the canvas for musings on how art, like magic, is an amalgamation of truth, lies, illusions and sleight of hand, and then proceeded to self-deprecatory reflections on his own journey as an artist – using false identities and fake stories, and even fictionalizing Howard Hughes in Citizen Kane – and, in arguably its most irresistible sections, amusing meditations and “stories” on Picasso. Captivatingly shot in grainy colours, it extensively featured his muse Oja Kodar in a series of sultry, shape-shifting personas.

Director: Orson Welles

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: France

Il Posto [1961]

 Ermanno Olmi’s tender, low-key, delicately strung and achingly beautiful masterpiece Il Posto – shaped from his personal experiences – remains such an acutely evocative and vividly realized work despite hardly much happening during its runtime. Though it carried the legacy of neorealism – with its humanist story, on-location filming and non-actors – its exploration of urban loneliness in the backdrop of a rapid post-war societal shifts towards giant corporations and social mobility possibly placed it closer to similar examinations by Antonioni, Godard and Tati, even if this stood apart on account of its hushed, understated and bittersweet tone. I, instead, found it profoundly reminiscent of two Jiří Menzel masterworks – Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String – in their shared poetic restraints while dwelling on mundane moments, blend of wry humour and absurdist irony with pathos, critiques of conformism, and muted comings-of-age of gauche, soft-spoken young guys. The said protagonist is Domenico (Sandro Panseri, whose perplexed demeanour, in turn, mirrored Václav Neckář from the two Menzel films), who follows his parents’ advice for a job at a big nameless organization. He travels from his cramped apartment in the outskirts to Milan, becomes besotted with the ethereal Antonietta (Loredana Detto, Olmi’s future wife), gets hired, is initially posted as a messenger and finally becomes a junior clerk in this vast bureaucratic setup. Gorgeously shot in grainy B/W – imbued with intimacy and melancholy – the film’s two most unforgettable segments featured the fleeting relationship between the two youngsters during the job interview, and a New Year’s Eve office event that transitioned from pensive to exuberant through droll humour and staging, and which reminded me of another Czech New Wave jewel, viz. Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Genre: Comedy-Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Todo Modo [1976]

 Elio Petri’s agitational and subversive cinema – and in turn Italian political cinema from its “years of lead” period, of which he was a leading force – reached a fever pitch with Todo Modo. This was a blistering and ferocious assault on the then political establishment – especially the Christian Democratic Party –, the Vatican’s ability to ensure their religious stranglehold through crafty manoeuvrings, and wealthy oligopolistic industrialists. In Petri’s hands – who could blend bravura experimental style with fearless left-wing lens – it was also a chilling examination of power, opportunism, hypocrisy, corruption and fascist tendencies, and the parasitic and chameleonic natures of the aforementioned troika. Adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novel of the same name, the feral satire is nearly completely set inside a stunningly conceived and designed Brutalist bunker – the cold, modernist and claustrophobic set design by Dante Ferretti gave the film an expressionistic and even sci-fi look, while enhancing its macabre tone – where the country’s most influential men have assembled for a few days, while a mysterious epidemic rages outside. They’re ostensibly there for a monastic retreat and spiritual cleansing; however, soon enough it’s clear that cunning machinations to further entrench their positions are what’s uppermost in their minds. Two men take centre-stage in this arrestingly orchestrated chaos – “il Presidente” (Gian Maria Volonté), a clear stand-in for Aldo Moro, whose religious fervour and sexual repressions are matched by his hunger for further consolidating his political position; and a creepy, hell-raising priest (Marcello Mastroianni) with skeletons in his closet – and this hilariously grotesque and anarchic setup attained surreal proportions as the men start facing violent deaths. Ennio Morricone composed the film’s score while the exceptional cast featured Michel Piccoli in a cameo.

Director: Elio Petri

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Ensemble Film

Language: Italy

Country: Italy