Tár

A six-time loser at this year’s Oscars – seriously, how? – Todd Fields’ classical music opus caused a culture wars upset on its release at the end of last year (or early this year, if you’re on UK time). Much of the fuss stemmed from a brilliant, endlessly dissected scene in which AnOther Magazine cover star Cate Blanchett, in imperious form as despotic composer Lydia Tár, tears into a student who calls Bach “problematic”. Cue the usual suspects hailing the film as “anti-woke”, and others accusing it of advancing harmful “snowflake teen” stereotypes – but the real thrill of the scene, as in the rest of Fields’ wonderfully slippery film, is that it works as a kind of cinematic Rorschach test, inviting us to peer into the soul of an artist spinning out of control.

Read AnOther’s interview with composer Hildur Guðnadóttir here.

Anatomy of a Fall

Few courtroom dramas can boast the haunting power of Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s masterful Palme d’Or winner, which also offered a fine showcase for the brilliant Sandra Hüller. When her husband dies after falling from a second-floor balcony at home in the Alps, crime novelist Sandra Voyter (Hüller) stands accused of his murder. At the trial, her home life comes under a microscope as her partially blind son, Daniel (a memorable debut from Milo Machado-Graner), is confronted with difficult questions about his mum. Has she dunnit? Triet declines to say, preferring instead to present Voyter as a kind of Schrödinger’s defendant, existing in a nebulous state of maybe non-guilt till she’s fixed with a stare.

Read AnOther’s interview with Justine Triet here.

Pacifiction

Nothing is as it seems in Pacifiction, the hypnotic eighth feature from slow-cinema provocateur Albert Serra. And by that we really do mean nothing: the bare bones of the plot, such as it is, concern Tahitian high commissioner De Roller (The Piano Teacher’s Benoît Magimel), holding court with the locals amid swirling rumours that nuclear testing will return to the island. What does any of this mean? To quote an old line: nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative, Serra filling the screen with images of wasting beauty that contemplate man’s ability to make a hell of even the most heavenly tropical paradise.

Read AnOther’s review here.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Nan Goldin goes up against Big Pharma in Laura Poitras’s brilliant opioid-crisis doc, a revealing portrait of the artist and why she fights. Goldin’s formative years were overshadowed by the suicide of her sister, a family secret that lit a fire of injustice in the young photographer, who soon fled the suburbs for the drag scene of 1970s Boston, and then New York. It’s here that she made her name chronicling the vibrant queer scene of downtown Manhattan, and the gathering storm of the Aids epidemic to come. From that era she emerges, battered but unbowed, to take on the Sacklers, whose name she succeeds in having removed from major art institutions across the world. Iconic.

Read AnOther’s interview with Laura Poitras here.

RMN

A deathly chill sits at the heart of RMN, Cristian Mungiu’s ripped-from-the-news tale of Transylvanian villagers taking up pitchforks against a group of migrant workers. It’s a vision of the modern European malaise in which there are no easy answers, only a queasy sense of foreboding pulled shockingly into focus during a tour de force, 15-minute scene at the village hall, where a debate about the workers’ rights to remain spills into chaos. This is ambitious, grownup filmmaking from the Romanian new-wave veteran, plunging head-first into one of the defining issues of our time.

Read AnOther’s interview with Cristian Mungiu here.

May December

Todd Haynes’s best film since Carol was a high-camp dissection of trashy Hollywood filmmaking, full of knockout scenes and shrewd insights on our worst rubbernecking instincts as viewers. Natalie Portman stars as film actress Elizabeth, who has recently arrived in Savannah, Georgia to research her role as Gracie (Julianne Moore), a former high-school teacher who caused a national scandal when her affair with a 13-year-old pupil was uncovered. 20 years on, a sense of normalcy has descended on the now-married pair, until Elizabeth’s probing brings repressed traumas to the surface which the actress is only too happy to exploit.

Read AnOther’s interview with Todd Haynes here.

Joyland

By turns sweet-natured and tragic, Saim Sadiq’s Cannes Jury Prize-winner follows Haider (Ali Junejo), a young married man in Lahore who takes a job as a backup dancer for an erotic theatre show. While keeping his new line of work a secret from his decidedly old-school dad and bullying older brother, he falls for transgender dancer Biba (Alina Khan), who takes him under her wing. Sadiq’s feature debut was acutely observed and often painfully funny, making sharp social commentary on Pakistan’s patriarchal society while extending sympathy to all of its victims.

Read AnOther’s interview with Saim Sadiq here.

Saint Omer

For her fiction-feature debut, Alice Diop draws on the shocking real-life case of a young Senegalese mother (Guslagie Malanda) who left her baby to drown on a beach in northern France. Imbuing the film with metafictional charge, she overlays this with the story of a writer and professor, Rama, (Kayije Kagame) who attends her trial, prompting existential tremors about her own complicated family life. “I immediately felt very familiar with this woman,” Diop told AnOther of her interest in the story, brought to life here with lucid direction and shattering performances by Kagame and Malanda.

Read AnOther’s interview with Alice Diop here.

Godland

In Hlynur Pàlmason’s ambitious follow-up to A White, White Day, uptight missionary Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) struggles to embrace the flinty good humour of locals in a 19th-century Icelandic village, having lugged his cross over literal volcanic plains to get there. Starkly hymning the barren beauty of the landscape, Pàlmason’s film is a blackly comic rebuke to the colonial mindset, crowned by a wonderful, time-lapse scene that serves to put human endeavour in its proper place. 

Read AnOther’s interview with Hlynur Pálmason here.

The Blue Caftan

When closeted Halim (Saleh Bakri), a dressmaker in Marrakech, hires a handsome younger man as an assistant at the shop he runs with his wife, we might think we have an idea of where Maryam Touzani’s beautifully crafted love story is heading. And indeed, it is – up to a point. But when Halim’s wife (the luminous Lubna Azabal) falls terminally ill, the film shifts gears to reveal a gorgeous meditation on devotion in all its forms – surprising, tender and wise.

Read AnOther’s review here.

Pearl

Ti West’s technicolour slasher was the year’s most daring horror film, a wickedly funny cross between The Wizard of Oz and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, centering on a young prairie farmgirl who dreams of being on the big screen, and also happens to be a raging psychopath. The star of the show is former AnOther Magazine cover star Mia Goth, on fully bonkers form as the wide-eyed antiheroine: imagine Shelley Duvall in The Shining on the other side of the axe, and you’ve got a feel for the baroque levels of insanity she brings to the part.

Read AnOther’s interview with Ti West here.

Beyond Utopia

Madeleine Gavin’s real-time account of defectors fleeing North Korea was a jaw-dropping journalistic coup, spotlighting the human stories behind the headlines on one of the world’s most cruelly repressive states. Its making was largely made possible by Pastor Seungeun Kim, the head of a Seoul-based underground network helping North Koreans to escape, who doubles as the film’s charismatic star. But the real story here is the images Gavin succeeds in putting on screen, which continue to haunt long after the credits roll.

Read AnOther’s interview with Madeleine Gavin here.

Past Lives

The year’s most talked-about debut was a Brief Encounter for the digital age, all buttoned-up desire and wistful magic-hour longing as married woman Nora (Greta Lee) reconnects with a figure from her childhood in South Korea. Though technically another entry into the fast-growing canon of cultural fish-out-of-water narratives about the east Asian diaspora, director Celine Song’s real subject here is time: the need to honour its passing, and the need to live for the now.

Read AnOther’s interview with Celine Song here.

Full Time

Full disclosure: I’d not seen Full Time, the small but perfectly formed second feature from French-Canadian director Éric Gravel, until it popped up on John Waters’s own end-of-year list earlier this month. Understated and gripping, the film follows single mum Julie (Call My Agent!’s Laure Calamy) as she tries to hold down her job at a Parisian hotel during a train strike. It sounds like a slice of life cut from the Dardennes’ school of social realism, but Gravel’s film has the speed-freak editing of a Safdie brothers flick, with the pulse-raising techno soundtrack to boot. And the ending is *perfect*.

Passages

We’ve all had a Tomas, the flighty auteur played by Franz Rogowski in Passages, in our lives at one point or another. Impetuous, brilliant, flaky and brutally ‘honest’ when it suits their own agenda, these people are a terror to themselves and anyone who gets caught up in their hurricane of bullshit – and so it proves in Ira Sachs’s terrific drama, which follows our antihero as he ricochets between long-term boyfriend Martin (former Another Man cover star Ben Whishaw) and Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teacher he meets at the wrap party for his new film. The result is a hot mess you won’t be able to tear your eyes from.

Read AnOther’s interview with actor Franz Rogowski here, and a conversation with costume designer Khadija Zeggaï here. 

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve’s films tend to announce themselves modestly, sometimes getting lost in the annual rounds of festival-season bingo as a result. But One Fine Morning was one of her best, featuring a career-high performance from former AnOther magazine cover star Léa Seydoux as young widow Sandra, who begins an affair with a married friend while caring for her dad, who is living with Alzheimer’s. Drawing on the director’s experiences with her own father, who died soon after the script was completed, Hansen-Løve’s film feels rich and lived-in, finding new ways to muse on her preferred themes of life, love and intellectual passion among the Parisian middle classes.

Read AnOther’s interview with Mia Hansen-Løve here.

The Eight Mountains

With its scenes of male emoting in high-altitude settings, The Eight Mountains was basically a Bon Iver album in cinematic form. Winsomely performed by its two leads, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, the film tells the story of city-kid Pietro, who develops an unshakable bond with farmer’s boy Bruno while holidaying at his family’s summer home in the Alps. Years later, the pair reconnect after the death of Pietro’s father, and are left to ponder the diverging paths their lives have taken. None of which explains the emotional wallop packed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s film, one of the year’s lesser-sung delights.

Read AnOther’s review here.

Cairo Conspiracy

From The Da Vinci Code to The Godfather: Part III, the history of the religious conspiracy thriller on screen is far from illustrious. But Tarik Saleh’s drama proudly bucks the trend, a moral maze of Le Carré-esque stature set within the walls of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University. When a student is murdered on campus, freshman Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) is recruited by government agents to spy on religious hardliners at the uni, whom they suspect of plotting to install a new Grand Imam. But who is plotting what here, exactly? Saleh pits church against state in this taut and suspenseful drama, which is surprisingly eloquent on matters of faith.

 Read AnOther’s review here.

Eileen

William Oldroyd follows Lady Macbeth with another psychosexual heater, this time adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel of the same name. In early 1960s Massachusetts, mousy male-prison warder Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) has her world rocked by the arrival of Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a blonde bombshell psychologist with ideas of shaking up the institution. As her obsession grows, so too do the cracks in her previously humdrum existence – with shades of Hitchcock and Du Maurier in the unfolding madness.

Read AnOther’s interview with Thomasin McKenzie and William Oldroyd here.

The Boy and the Heron

Throwing back to the fantasy epics of Studio Ghibli’s heyday, Hayao Miyazaki couldn’t resist the allure of one last job before retiring with The Boy and the Heron. When his mother is killed in a hospital fire during the Second World War, Mahito moves with his dad to a country estate, where a mysterious grey heron spirits him away (sorry) into a fantastical realm. The old magic is there, just a little sadder and wiser, in Miyazaki’s latest swansong, which summons up scenes of surpassing beauty that linger long after the plot’s sometimes hazy particulars fade into the background.