Life’s natural humour and the most profound thoughts and feelings captured in small, still moments and quiet exchanges are hallmarks of director Kore-eda Hirokazu, deftly shown in this story of a divorced father, scraping by as a private detective, who ends up stuck at his mother’s house along with his son and ex-wife as they sit out a typhoon.
Reimagined history with Vicki Krieps (The Phantom Thread) magnetic as the rebellious Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who must decide over the course of an imagined year how long she can bear life in a gilded cage. Carefully deployed anachronisms remind us these 18th Century lives are not so distant after all.
Beautiful, universally relatable capturing of hopes, dreams, love found and love lost through the lives of nurses who have come from small towns to Mumbai, where privacy is a luxury and loneliness is found throughout.
In the hands of Wim Wenders and his star, Kōji Yakusho, this film about a man whose days are all seemingly the same as he goes about his job cleaning toilets in Tokyo becomes a beautiful, gently uplifting Zen meditation on fulfilment, meaning and simple joys.
This must-see 1953 classic remains one of the most suspenseful films ever made. And we’re screening it in a brand-new 4k remastered version. Yves Montand stars, as two teams of desperate men in South America compete to be the first to deliver a truckload of highly unstable nitro-glycerine, along a route with the potential for obliteration at every turn.
At first this seems like a straightforward Nat Geo-style portrait of endearing census-taker Amber, asking people about their happiness in Bhutan, famed for its Gross National Happiness. But the filmmakers have tapped into something much deeper and more affecting.
Banned from making movies in his home country, acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) responded by mounting cameras within a taxicab and driving around Tehran for a day picking up passengers, supposedly at random. The result is both a love-letter to cinema and a revealing look at the country and its people.
A film for people who love films, from Wong Kar-wai, ‘the most romantic filmmaker in the world’. Stylised, stylish and seductive for those prepared to surrender to it, this is the seemingly separate but actually cleverly connected and mirrored stories of two lovelorn cops in bustling, colourful Hong Kong, before it was handed back to China.
Meditative, dreamlike, fantastical and mysterious, slyly funny and philosophical, surreal and free of plot as we know it, this film shows us the interior life of a calmly dying man visited by visions of his past, and past lives, and spirits from the beyond.
A must for film-lovers, as the director of Cinema Paradiso delves into the career of cinema composer maestro Morricone. This richly entertaining documentary delivers a feast of memorable clips from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Hateful Eight and many more.
Istanbul is famed for many things, including its street cats. This beautifully shot documentary reveals the city’s life and heart through seven of its distinct feline characters and the people who interact with them.
This based-on-a-true-story Mexican drama, about an unorthodox teacher who joins a school in a dangerous, impoverished town and refuses to accept that its kids have no futures, hits all the familiar notes of the genre — and is no less powerful for doing so.
This story of a lost-soul archaeologist turned tomb-raider (Josh O’Connor) in 1980s Italy and the people around him is beguiling, poetic, funny, mournful, romantic, strange, magical and utterly distinctive.
An immersive, sometimes heart-stopping spectacle that demands to be seen on the big screen, this documentary from the director of Gunda has no narration. It lets its incredible visuals and audio tell the story of water in all its forms on our planet.
