Blue Heron [2025]

 Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari transitioned from short diaries to a nakedly personal feature-length debut with Blue Heron, thereby providing a culmination of her explorations thus far and an assured step forward. This lyrical and intimate meditation on memories – therapeutic attempts at filling the gaps and reconciling with them – was weaved as a fragile diptych of two interlocking canvases. The first half, presented from the nostalgia-laden perspective of 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), narrated a Hungarian immigrant family’s relocation to Vancouver Island in the 1990s and the struggles of the parents – the father (Ádám Tompa) who’s mostly lost in his artistic pursuits and the exasperated mother (Iringó Réti) who takes care of the kids – in dealing with Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), an adolescent and the eldest of their four children born of a different biological father, who’s irreconcilably sliding into self-destructive and dangerous behavioural disorders. The second half took us a couple of decades ahead, from wistful past to melancholic present, as thirtysomething amateur filmmaker Sasha (Amy Zimmer) strives to document and comprehend Jeremy’s losing battles with mental health, his tragic inability to fit in and the eventual fading away of his existence, and therefore come to terms with her grief and loss. The film was composed using gorgeous images of the exquisite locale and their messy home, shot in soft tones and shallow focus through evocative framings and angles, windows and reflections, close-ups and wide-angles, and sun-kissed colours. One can’t help but pair it with Carla Simón’s Romería – another intimate autofiction from 2025, which too comprised of the filmmaker’s adult stand-in piecing together her prismatic and palimpsest memories, including at one point walking into them by breaching the boundaries of realism.

Director: Sophy Romvari

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Docufiction/Coming-of-Age/Diary Film/Autobiographical Cinema

Language: English/Hungarian

Country: Canada

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

Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) [2025]

Marathi filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s tender and assured feature debut Sabar Bonda – weaved with intimate semi-autobiographical elements, memories and reflections – was an intensely muted expression of barely contained emotions. A contrapuntal evocation of grief and desire, two supposedly antithetical emotions, it also captured with subtlety what could’ve easily made for acrid parody, viz. the very Indian habit of family elders and “well-wishers” freely encroaching into private spaces and imparting unsolicited advices on life choices and marital decisions. Informed and shaped by the director’s own experiences upon his father’s demise a decade back, which necessitated a rather uncomfortable trip back from Bombay to his village that he hadn’t visited in many years, the film too opened with a similarly reluctant “homecoming” of Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a 30-something gay man employed in a middle-income job in Bombay, to his ancestral village for performing his father’s last rites. Though he’d “come out” to his parents long back, his extended family members aren’t explicitly aware of his sexuality – though not fully unaware either – and consequently, along with instructions on how he should mourn, also doggedly badger him on marriage. However, contrary to societal expectations, he rekindles his intimacy with Balya (Suraaj Suman), an old friend who’s similarly single and a farmer who’s craving to escape from his rural environs. Naturalistically shot in soft colours, lyrical exteriors and framed in rounded edges like old photographs, Kanawade’s understated depiction of the fraught situation – and toned-down evocation of the homophobic atmosphere – was laced with undercurrents of defiance and a wish for the mundane. Alongside the two male leads, competently played by theatre actors who’ve known each other for long, Jayshri Jagtap was also memorable as Anand’s mother.

Director: Rohan Kanawade

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Slice-of-Life

Language: Marathi

Country: India

Magellan [2025]

 With his hypnotic film Magellan – through co-existence of sublime beauty and harrowing monstrosity – Lav Diaz delivered a searing peek into the horrors, madness and violence of colonial adventurism, and a trip into the heart of darkness. Sitting alongside such spellbinders on this theme as Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Martel’s Zama, the great Filipino auteur’s smouldering latest exercise in formal rigour and slow cinema – at a “mere” 2 hours 45 minutes it’s among his “crispest” works, but there’s apparently an 8-9 hour director’s cut waiting somewhere – depicted a demythologized examination of the colonial campaigns to Malaysia and the Philippines by 16^th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (played by Gael Garcia Bernal, an international star, which is a first for Diaz, even if in a non-heroic turn). It begins with the capture of Malacca under Afonso de Albuquerque’s command, in which Magellan participated and returned with a slave. Back home in Lisbon, while dealing with the accusatory gaze of widows of dead compatriots and marriage to Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo) who nurses him to health, he first tries in futility with the Portuguese king and then successfully convinces the Spanish king to sponsor a crazy circumnavigation voyage. The film – composed through ethereal and visually splendorous static frames straight out of classical oil paintings – thereby covered the exhausting expedition that begun Magellan’s descent into zealotry and brutality, and then his obsessive attempts at converting Cebu’s residents en masse into Christianity, while punishing “heretics”, that ended in bloody carnage. Epic in scope, minimalist in form, staggering in ambition and viciously powerful in its anti-imperialist stance, this is a bold new direction in Diaz’s life-long meditations on his country’s past and present.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/Biopic/War/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Spanish/Cebuano

Country: Philippines

Sentimental Value [2025]

 Memory, mortality, familial fissures, and complex filial relationships, were blended with art as therapy, cinema as a tool for personal and political catharsis, and weights of history in Joachim Trier’s self-reflexive, ravishingly composed and emotionally rapturous film Sentimental Value. Trier’s ability to interlace weighty thematic inquiries with exuberance, vitality and humour – carried forward from his smash hit Worst Person in the World – made this a bittersweet and richly realized expression. Upon their mother’s demise, brilliant theatre actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) – battling inner demons, from crippling stage fright to depression and suicidal urges – and her restrained sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic researcher living a quiet family life, find themselves having to reckon with the arrival of their estranged father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) – a renowned but now semi-retired filmmaker who had a torrid marriage with their mom and chose his craft over them – back into their lives. He intends to return to filmmaking with his most personal script yet – ostensibly based on his mom who was part of the Norwegian resistance against Nazis and committed suicide when he was seven – and offers the role to Nora. However, when she refuses to work with him, he casts American star Rachel (Elle Fanning) who’s become his admirer upon attending his retrospective at a film festival. Skarsgård and Reinsve were magnetic, and Lilleaas no less incredible, in this nuanced yet expressive, and delicately strung piece that reminded me of Mia Hansen-Løve’s marvelous Bergman Island in their shared association with the Swedish giant and meta-cinematic flourishes. The film’s most standout moments included a third-person chronicle of the Borgs’ beautiful family house, a stirring film-within-film sequence, and an intimate heart-to-heart between the sisters.

Director: Joachim Trier

Genre: Drama/Family Drama

Language: Norwegian/English/Swedish

Country: Norway

Sound of Falling [2025]

 Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling – her sophomore feature, made a decade after her debut (Dark Blue Girl) – was a haunting and unsettling multi-generational saga steeped in desire, angst, resentments, trauma, violence and death, and propelled by spectral undercurrents, feminine ferocity and tumultuous historical forces. The riveting feminist exercise complemented its disturbing moments and disquieting tone with poetic and ethereal lyricism, and unfolded in the intersection of Tarkovsky, Haneke and Lynch. The formally audacious script weaved a complex tapestry cutting across more than a century, albeit set in the same rural farmhouse alongside the Elbe. The eerily tranquil locale complemented the tormented lives of female characters across four interconnected periods – little Alma (Hanna Heckt), who becomes infatuated with the photograph of a dead sister who looked exactly like her, and her mischievous but doomed elder sister Lia (Greta Krämer) in early 20^th century just before WW1; Erika (Lea Drinda), an impish young woman in the 1940s during WW2, who’s become carnally fixated on her amputee uncle with a harrowing backstory; the rebellious and anguished Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), who lives with her pensive mother in the 1980s – in what was then East Germany – and must deal with the lecherous gazes of her uncle and cousin, and her own suicidal impulses; and adolescent Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), who gets intensely drawn to an enigmatic teen (Ninel Geiger) grieving her mother’s demise. The strangely elliptical narrative – the four marvellously enacted ensemble stories were nonchronologically intercut, thus indicating how the future and the past simultaneously mimic and inform one another – was stunningly shot using roving ghost-like cameras over dazzling long takes, disconcerting POV shots and close-ups, voyeuristic peeks, claustrophobic interior spaces, and vivid outdoor vistas.

Director: Mascha Schilinski

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Coming-of-Age/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

Romería [2025]

 Romería – Carla Simón’s delicate, melancholic and gorgeously sun-kissed third film was a nakedly autobiographical work from her. The Catalan director lost her parents to AIDS when she was six, grew up with her uncle and his family, and went on to study filmmaking. Her delicately realized alter-ego Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has a similar personal arc, and her haunting quest for her deceased parents – alongside reconciliations with her hazy memories of them – informed this deeply personal film. The striking 18-year-old protagonist, who intends to study film at university, needs to get recognized on her father’s death certificate to be eligible for scholarship, and hence travels to the coastal city of Vigo in the hopes of getting a notarized attestation from her paternal grandparents who she’s never met. There, over the course of five days, she meets uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces all of whom welcome her with a mix of warmth and curiosity; her seemingly genial grandfather attempts to “bribe” her with money that’ll allow her to pursue her studies without the need for scholarship and therefore the legal formalities; and her stern grandmother openly disapproves her presence. Armed with her mom’s diary that steers her “homecoming” and a digital camcorder frequently complementing her own eyes, she starts piecing together what really happened to her parents – who embodied Spain’s “lost generation” – through interactions with her newly found family, their oftentimes conflicting accounts, and an unsaid sense of shame surrounding their tragic backstories. Led by the wonderful Garcia and a lively cast, this visually sumptuous work reminded me of such recent films as Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and in particular, Karim Aïnouz’s docu essay Mariner of the Mountains.

Director: Carla Simon

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Autobiographical Cinema/Diary Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

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

Two Prosecutors [2025]

 Sergei Loznitsa’s stark, gripping and viscerally crushing film Two Prosecutors – a rare narrative feature by the exiled filmmaker and politically outspoken activist-archivist who’s best-known for his formally rigorous found-footage documentaries – delivered a devastating parable on the horrors and banality of totalitarianism. The Kafkaesque work, with Gogolian and Orwellian undercurrents, is set in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge, and was adapted from a novella by Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Demidov who was himself a political prisoner for eighteen years on charges of being a Trotskyist. However, its Stalinist period setting notwithstanding, it powerfully speaks to all totalitarian bureaucracies and nation-states across eras, geographies and political spectrums. While destroying evidences of protestations by political prisoners, the man ordered with the task carries out a small act of disobedience by sneaking out one of the letters. That triggers the arrival of doggedly idealistic prosecutor and young Bolshevik Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to the Bryansk prison, who obstinately believes in the ideas of truth and justice much to the detriment of his physical wellbeing. After overcoming psychological gamesmanships by the brutish prison authorities and labyrinthine prison corridors, he meets an old Bolshevik (Aleksandr Filippenko) who’s been dubiously imprisoned and tortured by NKVD. Kornyev decides to travel to Moscow to meet the country’s real-life Procurator General Andrey Vyshinsky (Anatoliy Beliy), hoping for his intervention… he does intervene, but not in the manner Kornyev had hoped for. Shot in desaturated colours, long takes and austere framing which amplified the oppressive, claustrophobic and ominous atmosphere, it comprised of two particularly nerve-racking waits and two darkly funny asides – viz. a rambling monologue by an amputee Leninist (Filippenko again) and a deliberately incongruous song by two ominously effusive men.

Director: Sergei Loznitsa

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Historical Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Germany/Ukraine

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

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

Peter Hujar's Day [2025]

 In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz – who loved harnessing casual conversations and gossips – invited celebrated photographer and her friend Peter Hujar – who was still operating in the margins at that time, even if he was already a part of New York’s underground cultural circle, and died at the young age of 53 a decade later due to AIDS related complications – to her Upper East Side apartment to share how his previous day had been. The freeform “interview” that was recorded on tape as part of an intended larger project was unfortunately lost, but the manuscript resurfaced nearly half-a-century later in 2021, and which filmmaker Ira Sachs discovered at a Parisian LGBTQ+ bookstore. Peter Hujar’s Day is a delectable adaptation of that interaction – at once a meticulous, word-for-word transliteration of the text and a self-reflexive interpretation through such playful gestures as changing attires, the day transitioning into night in sync with Hujar’s recap, jump cuts, and the film’s crew bleeding into the frame on occasions. This warm, droll and captivating work provided a fascinating time capsule of 1970s NYC while also revealing, through gentle touches, the deep friendship that Rosenkrantz (tenderly portrayed by Rebecca Hall) had with Hujar (played with terrific panache by Ben Whishaw). Over the course of this intimate pas de deux, an exceptionally chatty Hujar recounts activities both consequential (Allen Ginsberg’s photoshoot, receiving tips for winning over William Burroughs, phone call from Susan Sontag, the challenges of getting paid, etc.) and banal (napping, eating Chow Mein, etc.), and their rambling exchanges – mostly indoors but at times on the balcony with the NYC skyline as backdrop – were captured in rich, grainy and exquisitely zeitgeisty 16-mm photography and art décor.

Director: Ira Sachs

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US

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

Portobello [2025]

 It’s quite astonishing that Marco Bellochhio, a (hopefully) soon-to-be nonagenarian who made his directorial debut six decades back, is still making films that’re bold, ambitious, caustic, rebellious, comprises of electrifying moments and filled with throbbing vitality. His second television miniseries – made four years after Exterior Night, a similarly vigorous and riveting recounting of a complex and sensational chapter from contemporary Italian history – Portobello flamboyantly glided through a real-life soap opera filled with kitsch, melodrama, scandal-mongering, lurid machinations, “theatre of the absurd” and a proto version of cancel culture. Enzo Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni, in his third consecutive collaboration with Bellocchio and fourth overall) was at the peak of his popularity in the early-1980s when things took a spectacular nose-dive for him and he was plunged into a bizarre nightmare. He was the host of the enormously popular weekly TV show – a rather cheesy programme that was fervently devoured by 28 million viewers – when Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella), a creepy and egotistic Comorra member who was obsessed with Tortora and turns into an informant for the Italian authorities, falsely alleges the latter of being a drug trafficker for the mafia out of sheer spite. Few of his fellow turncoats, too, join him in that, and as a result Tortora’s life comes crashing down, leading to a frustrating, traumatic and seemingly endless battle with an obsessed state prosecution. Bellocchio splendidly captured the zeitgeist through ambitiously mounted set-pieces and production designs, and the utterly farcical nature of the scenario through a mix of drama, bombast and sardonic humour, thereby making this a thrilling seriocomic ride. The firebrand Italian filmmaker’s pointed jabs at his country’s social, political, judicial, religious and criminal layers continue unabated.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Drama/Legal Drama/Crime Drama/Biopic/TV Miniseries

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Young Mothers [2025]

 Teenagers struggling to break free from the vicious cycle of marginalized existence, abandonment and abuse – a recurrent theme in the Dardenne brothers’ films – formed the underlying premise in their tender, poignant, compassionate and delicately weaved portrayal of teenage motherhood in Young Mothers. Marking a terrific return to form after a couple of strained efforts for the septuagenarian brothers – two years shy of completing 50 years of co-directing films – it emphatically underlined the radical empathy, bleak social realism and spare, documentary-style form that the Belgian duo has been identified with since their international breakout with the unforgettable La Promesse 3 decades back, while expanding their palette through a hyperlink film that traversed between the interweaved stories of four working-class teenagers housed in a state-run shelter in Liège. Soon-to-be-mother Jessica (Babette Verbeek), having always struggled with abandonment, is desperately seeking to establish contact with her biological mother (India Hair); Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), meanwhile, has an extremely complicated relationship with her volatile mom (Christelle Cornil), a recovering alcoholic who was in a toxic affair, and consequently wants to give up her baby for adoption to a grounded middle-class couple; the increasingly agitated Perla (Lucie Laruelle) wishes in futility to have a conventional life with the distant father of their child fresh out of institutionalization; former drug addict Julia (Elsa Houben), on the other hand, has a loving boyfriend and is on the verge of making it if only she can avoid sliding back. Ariana’s story stood out as the most complex and heartbreaking in these edgy, moving and outstandingly performed tales bereft of any moral grandstanding or contrivances, and where harsh socioeconomic realities fiercely combat for hope (howsoever fleeting and tenuous).

Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Urban Drama

Language: French

Country: Belgium

Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

The Mastermind [2025]

 Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist “anti-genre” exercises – subversion of genre trappings, prioritizing inaction over actions, and leaving cine-goers without conventional payoffs – have produced anti-road movies (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), anti-Westerns (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), anti-political/legal thrillers (Night Moves, Certain Women), and anti-relationship/domestic dramas (Certain Women, Showing Up). She’s now made an absorbing anti-heist film with the beguiling and captivating The Mastermind. On that note, it recalled two other marvellous recent films – Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (especially how they glided through mischievous non-sequiturs) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (both starred Josh O’Connor as roguish art thieves, though the similarities in their characters ended there). The protagonist here may well be the world’s worst art thief, giving a deliberately ironic ring to the film’s hyperbolic title. Aimless, unemployed, emotionally stunted, financially dependent on his well-off parents and working wife, and once considered very promising, JB (O’Connor) is the quintessential drifter. The Massachusetts resident hatches a foolhardy plot to steal four paintings – tellingly, by the American abstract painter Arthur Dove, thereby demonstrating his intellectual superiority over his material stupidity – by borrowing money from his mom, employing fellow losers and with no follow-through or backup plans. Significant portions of the film delved into the aftermaths of the robbery, as things go south right-away and JB is forced to go on the lam. The terrific jazz score complemented the improvisational form, and O’Connor embodied his character’s aloof, self-serving, hangdog charm, untouched by the era he’s living in, viz. the 1970s, anti-Vietnam War protests and counter-culture movements. The zeitgeist, incidentally, existed in the edges, bleeding in through the brilliant diagetic soundscape (TV programmes, radio bulletins, people speaking in the backgrounds), until JB inadvertently walks into it.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Crime Drama/Heist Film/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

The Voice of Hind Rajab [2025]

 On 29^th January 2024, Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, was killed in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. Six of her family members – uncle, aunt and four cousins – were earlier killed, leaving the little girl stranded, while two paramedics were also killed upon trying to rescue her. This massacre, which became a harrowing reminder of the ensuing genocide, and the desperate but ultimately futile rescue attempts by the Palestine Red Crescent Society from their West Bank headquarters, formed the subject of the deeply discomfiting docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, in her previous work Four Daughters, had blended documentary and performative elements into a stunning hybrid film, and she went for a similarly bold formal gamble here. She set it entirely in the humanitarian organization’s office, featuring dramatization of the actual individuals involved in remotely leading the rescue efforts, and used the actual recordings of the little girl’s voice – helpless, confused, afraid and too young to fully comprehend this horrendous scenario – to lend authenticity to the proceedings. While the adults in the room – call centre worker Omar (Motaz Malhees); his supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani); Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who’s responsible for coordinating with the authorities and paramedics; and Nisreen (Clara Khoury), who provides counselling to the traumatized employees – battle through the night, their emotionally fraught conversations shot in near-real-time – that portrayed the extreme psychological toll and bordered on histrionics – made for an unsettling contrast to the actual voice of the deceased kid. This counterbalancing between commentaries on the war crime and staged verisimilitude – and reducing the girl to just an anchoring voice – was an ethically fraught choice, even if it was a distressing watch.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/War

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia

Miroirs No. 3 [2025]

 Miroirs No. 3, with its beguiling set-up, eerily tranquil tone with an underlying disquietude that gently builds, disarming and economical narrative that defies complex people and themes, and exploration of identity and memory, was immediately recognizable as a Christian Petzold film. The recurrence of automobile accidents in his filmography, and his sparing use of haunting, off-kilter music, were also present. It channelled two of his films in particular – the sunny, rustic setting and an understated human story that evolves through stray, low-key interactions reminded me heavily of his ravishing last film Afire; however, the one that it formed the closest companion piece to was his unnerving earlier film Yella, as both featured what can perhaps be called “hyperreal/quasi ghost stories”. Like the latter film, this too begun with a shocking road accident; while her partner, with whom her relationship was already faltering, instantly dies, Laura (Paula Beer), the emotionally drifting heroine and music student, emerges largely unscathed from it. She’s provided accommodation by Betty (Barbara Auer), a kindly older woman with whom Laura had fleeting eye contacts earlier and whose house is located adjacent to the accident site, and they promptly settle into a peaceful domestic routine – cooking, painting fences, grocery shopping, having coffee, etc. Betty, unbeknownst to Laura, harbours a past trauma, and that – along with what catalysed this bond – starts surfacing when Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), both expert car mechanics and seemingly estranged from her, arrive in the scene. Classical and pop tracks delightfully featured in the diagetic score of this work marked by a lovely interplay between being restrained and emotionally charged. The performances, led by the two women, were particularly remarkable.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany