This review contains various thematic spoilers but only vague allusions to plot spoilers. Read at your discretion.

A Brighter Summer Day is a truth epic, a four hour journey into the abyss of teenage disillusionment. It's about the reality of growing up and the consequences of an aimless life. It's a quiet movie, of people kissing in the dark, with conversations happening between people offscreen, of themes muted in favour of shapeless ideas. It's paced like life itself, with threads…

Werckmeister Harmonies is a film of constant symbolism and allegory. It is the greatest philosophical and political allegory since Sátántangó, another film by master auteur Béla Tarr. Werckmeister Harmonies is Tarr's most exciting film (although Sátántangó remains his best) because it's the most brimming with ideas. Adapting the novel The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies more than matches the quality of the masterful original text. The film is more implicit in some ways, taking the dense metaphorical nature of the novel but…

Disclosure Day is not one of Spielberg's best films, but it is a very solid original blockbuster. It's the sort of film that is so easy to engage with, filled with compelling characters, intriguing mystery, and slick filmmaking. It's a bit weirder than the franchise fodder Hollywood tends to churn out, giving it more character and heart. Spielberg's continued interest in UFOs returns, via a plot about people compelled to act by some unknown force. It is very Close Encounters…

The Turin Horse feels like the total statement of Béla Tarr's filmography. It seems an allegory for everything. Films like Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies examined people within social systems, but The Turin Horse seems to be a metaphor for all human life, or at least the majority. It depicts a peasant life, a normal reality for centuries of our ancestors. It is a weary and repetitive existence, which makes The Turin Horse the slowest and toughest of Tarr's films. It…

Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki's epic, his greatest work. It is profound and complex, and dense in mythology and history. For a man whose career was solidified by the soft and sweet nature of My Neighbour Totoro, it was bold and ambitious to make a film this long, grim, and nihilistic. Princess Mononoke is Studio Ghibli's most thematically sophisticated work. It is also the finest original animated film in history. It is one of the most perfect films ever made…

Bad people are complicated. There is something dark at the centre of The Lost Daughter, a film which viciously tears apart the idealism we often have about motherhood. It is a film of mothers, but not one of love. Instead we see a rot, mothers who find children a burden. The Lost Daughter is an uncomfortable movie, with a constant unease and sense of dread. We wait to be given answers, for characters to be uncovered and exposed, and yet…