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Magellan (2025)
Through Lav Diaz’s rigorously composed tableaux stretching from Portugal to Indonesia, Magellan deconstructs the mythology of its infamous explorer, applying an austere, postcolonial lens to the hubris which underlies such violent acts of conquest.
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Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Through Hiroshi Teshigahara’s elemental metaphor in Woman in the Dunes, sand becomes the formless structure of one man’s existential imprisonment, trapping him in a Sisyphean struggle of labour that slowly absorbs him into a primordial, ever-shifting desert.
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Sirāt (2025)
Dragging us through dust, heat, and excruciating tension of the Moroccan desert, Sirāt navigates one man’s attempts to find his daughter within its hallucinatory rave culture, relentlessly pushing him ever closer to the brink of his own physical and psychological limits.
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Ballad of a Small Player (2025)
Hell is a condition of being for souls lost to compulsion in Ballad of a Small Player, and one that Edward Berger blurs into a gilded convergence of superstition, lighting up the global gambling capital as a dazzling, ghostly underworld of endless consumption.
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The Drama (2026)
Kristoffer Borgli hinges The Drama upon a twisted secret, luring audiences into one of the funniest, messiest, and darkest romantic comedies of recent years, as he dismantles a couple’s mutual trust in the week leading up to their wedding.

