La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher’s dazzling, mythopoetical romp through the Italian countryside of her youth stars Josh O’Connor as a kind of sadsack Indiana Jones, looting treasures from ancient Etruscan graves while mourning the loss of his girlfriend. But while her hero pouts fetchingly in his white rumpled suit, his merry band of tombaroli – tomb raiders – in tow, Rohrwacher has a blast behind the camera in this totally joyous, life-affirming work of genius.

Read AnOther’s interview with Josh O’Connor and Alice Rohrwacher here.

The Zone of Interest

The Hösses are a middle-class German family who worry about normal family stuff: gardens, job promotions, people traipsing mud in through the hallway. They’ve just moved into their dream home in the country, but horror lurks outside the frame in the shape of Auschwitz prison camp, where the family’s head, Rudolf, worked to oversee the murder of some two million people during the second world war. Jonathan Glazer’s unforgettable foray into the psychology of mass murder was strikingly conceived, masterfully executed and occasionally deadening in its insistence on dramatic irony. I’m not sure anyone else could have pulled it off.

Read our full review here and our interview with actor Christian Friedel here.

Poor Things

Alasdair Gray’s satire of gothic-era literary mores proves a perfect match for Yorgos Lanthimos’ own pet themes in this juggernaut steampunk fantasy, the Greek shock-merchant’s biggest film to date. Boasting a blinding turn from Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman brought back from the dead with a child’s brain in the name of ‘science’, it’s a work of sexually and linguistically uninhibited ambition from cinema’s reigning king of perversion.

Read our full review here and our interview with costume designer Holly Waddington here. 

The Room Next Door

Death becomes Pedro Almodóvar in The Room Next Door, a weepie two-hander starring Tilda Swinton as a terminally ill journalist planning to take her own life, and Julianne Moore as the friend who reluctantly helps her go through with it all. Swapping his trademark melodramatic élan for a mood of wintry introspection, there’s enough heart and flashes of the old wicked humour here to make this an essential addition to the Spanish master’s canon.

Read our interview with Tilda Swinton here.

Anora

A box-office smash and surprise Oscars frontrunner, Anora is the culmination of two decades spent bringing America’s fringes to life for director Sean Baker. Led by a powerhouse performance from its breakout star, Mikey Madison, the film brings screwball comic style to the story of sex-worker Ani, who is caught up in a fairytale romance with the son of a Russian oligarch. “A breathlessly good time,” we wrote of the film in November, but was Baker’s vision “just as much a fantasy as the sex-worker cliches it seeks to discredit”? Either way, it’s a deserved lap of honour for one of the best filmmakers working in America today.

Read our guide to the films of Sean Baker here.

Perfect Days

When Wim Wenders came to Tokyo in 2021 to make a short film about toilets, he was moved to make Perfect Days, the slice-of-life tale of a near-mute toilet cleaner (Japanese screen legend Kōji Yakusho, wonderful) who takes pride in his work while finding simple poetry in the everyday. It’s a lesson in the art of wanting nothing that struck a resonant chord with viewers, who rewarded the German new wave maestro with the biggest box-office hit of his career.

Read our interview with Wim Wenders here.

Evil Does Not Exist

Ryusuke Hamaguchi followed up his career-milestone Drive My Car with this modestly scaled but philosophically rich inquiry into the costs of human progress, full of eerie images of natural beauty and surprising moments of comedy. Just when you think you have the whole thing sussed out, Hamaguchi biffs us over the head with a harrowaing climax, foreshadowed by composer Eiko Ishibashi’s indelible score.

Read our interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi here.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Comfortably out-weirding anything else on this list, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is the latest rambling, transgressive tour de force from Romanian director Radu Jude, an unruly workplace comedy taking aim at Andrew Tate-wannabe influencers, corporate malfeasance and the disillusionments of consumer society. Needless to say, this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s fearless filmmaking from a true renegade of the medium.

Read our interview with Radu Jude here.

Priscilla

Hitching her fabled first-world ennui to the story of Elvis’s teenage bride, Priscilla was a pastel-toned return to form for Sofia Coppola, directing here with great sensitivity and feeling. Even the Presley estate’s refusal to grant permission to use his songs becomes a blessing to the film, the ersatz rockers of the King’s 60s period swapped for a cherry-bomb OST that rightly puts Priscilla’s story up front and centre.

Read our full review here and our interview with actor Cailee Spaeny here. 

Challengers

Anyone for tennis? Luca Guadagnino’s biggest box-office hit to date is a relentless exercise in style, a flashy and unsubtle twist on Jules & Jim that basks in the supercharged chemistry of its leads. Zendaya excels as the red-hot centre of the film’s flaming love triangle, but would we have liked to see Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor’s homoerotic bond explored in more depth? Probably, yes, but Guadagnino’s breathless direction ensures we don’t get the chance to dwell on it all that much.

Read Another Man’s profile of Mike Faist here and our guide to the work of Luca Guadagnino here.

About Dry Grasses

“Intimate in scale and epic in scope”, About Dry Grasses is Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterful character study about a teacher, Senan (Deniz Celiloğlu), at a rural Turkish secondary school accused of inappropriate behaviour with a pupil. Fighting to keep his job, he competes with his colleague and roommate for the affections of a teacher from the neighbouring village, Nuray (the magnetic Merve Dizdar), a left-wing activist who lost her leg in a terrorist explosion. With a superb script and fine performances all round, Ceylan’s film has the intellectual swagger of a Russian novel of ideas and a protagonist who’s somewhere between a Dostoevskian antihero and an outright creep.

Hoard

South London filmmaker Luna Carmoon wowed critics with Hoard, a pungent coming-of-age drama about an emotionally damaged young girl’s relationship with an engaged older man, which dredges up the past in ways both exciting and alarming. There are superb performances from Saura Lightfoot-Leon and Joseph Quinn – Lightfoot-Leon, in her screen debut, does a fantastic job nailing her character’s weird physicality and magnetism. And Carmoon is clearly a force to be reckoned with: apparently, she doused the furniture on set with perfume smelling of sweat, semen, milk and blood to trigger her cast, which is just the sort of madness we’d like to see more of in our homegrown filmmaking talent.

Read our interview with Luna Carmoon here.

Close Your Eyes

Victor Erice is perhaps best known as the man who made The Spirit of the Beehive, a child’s-view account of civil war-era Spain that inspired Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Close Your Eyes is only his third feature in 50 years, but it was worth the wait: a haunting drama about a director’s attempts to solve the mystery of his friend’s disappearance some two decades prior, the film opens out into a deeply felt meditation on memory, ageing, identity and the stubborn belief in art’s power to redeem.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

How should the dead pay for their misdeeds? Rungano Nyoni tackles thorny issues of grief and complicity among a middle-class Zambian family in her ambitious second feature, centred on a funeral for an uncle whose crimes of abuse threaten to spill out into the open. A Lusaka native who grew up in Britain, Nyoni’s vision of Zambian cultural life is surreal and often savagely comic, alert to the strange beauty of its customs without erasing the ways in which they occasionally deny and conspire against women.

Read our interview with Rungano Nyoni here.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

Fans of Apichatpong Weerasethakul should seek out Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a stunning slow-cinema coup from first-time director Phạm Thiên Ân, who won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in May. When his sister-in-law dies in a motorcycle crash in Saigon, Thiam takes her son to the country for the funeral, where figures from his past force him to confront a nagging emptiness in his own life. Sustaining a mood of beguiling mystery over its three-hour runtime, it’s a study of absence and longing that finds God in the ticking of a glow-in-the-dark clock.

Banel and Adama

A “tragic romance for the age of climate anxiety”, Banel & Adama was the head-turning feature debut from French filmmaker Ramata Toulaye-Sy. Young lovers Banel and Adama are plotting their lives together when drought comes to their Senegalese farming community, forcing Adama to choose between love and duty. While her boyfriend fights to save the village, Banel begins to unravel as her love, like the sun that beats down incessantly in the film, turns from life-sustaining force to annihilating power. Toulaye-Sy takes a superficially simple love story and turns it into a harrowing dream of the future that’s hard to shake.

Read our interview with Ramata Toulaye-Sy here.

All We Imagine As Light

Payal Kapadia’s first feature-length fiction work comprises two parts, equally gorgeous: one, a portrait of precarious living in the modern city of Mumbai, focused on three nurses drifting through days of quiet yearning and unfulfillment. The second, a seaside escape that becomes the promise of something more, a nocturnal reverie of sisterhood that reveals Kapadia’s vision as inherently political. Both are hypnotic, carried gently by the ethereal piano of late composer and nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru and a pulse of electricity from Mumbai musician Topshe.

Read our interview with Payal Kapadia here.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

Combining the droll existentialism of Aki Kaurismäki with an upbeat style of its own, Georgian filmmaker Elene Naveriani’s tale of a stoic middle-aged shopkeeper discovering love (and sex) for the first time was one of the year’s most unexpected pleasures: sweet (but not too sweet) and true.

Read our interview with Elene Naveriani here.

Slow

Sex is back in the movies, the New York Times declared last year when a wave of films conspired to put the sizzle back in cinema after a post-MeToo lull. Then there was Slow, Marija Kavtaradzė’s sensuous second feature about an interpretive dance teacher’s impassioned – but mostly very chaste – affair with an asexual man. Turning an intimate lens on an under-explored subject, the Lithuanian filmmaker follows the twists and turns of the pair’s relationship with great sensitivity – and there’s an easy, insouciant chemistry between its two leads, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Kęstutis Cicėnas.

Read our interview with Marija Kavtaradzė here.

Monster

Hirokazu Kore-eda reminds us why he’s one of cinema’s great humanist voices with Monster, the moving tale of two schoolboys’ quasi-romantic bond. Telling the story Rashomon-style from competing points of view, Kore-eda assembles the pieces with a meticulous eye for detail, delivering a sad and beautiful coming-of-age film that also serves as a troubling, self-reflexive study in the limits of empathy.

Read our interview with Hirokazu Kore-eda here and a guide to his work here.