-
Resident Evil (2026)
It takes a horror craftsman unburdened by convention to recognise Resident Evil’s appeal beyond the game controller, and in the lean construction of Zach Cregger’s adaptation, the barest essentials of survival are enough to sustain such a gruelling, propulsive narrative.
-
The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
The China that once seemed governed by community is swallowed up by sprawling bureaucracy in The Story of Qiu Ju, and as one peasant woman seeks legal justice against her village chief, Yimou Zhang laments the loss of its simple, unsullied dignity.
-
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
Within Zhang Yimou’s political fable of four rival mistresses competing for their Master’s favour, Raise the Red Lantern conceals an insidious, patriarchal terror, casting its manor in the smouldering crimson glow of privilege and peril.
-
Paisan (1946)
Paisan not only offers Roberto Rossellini’s broadest consideration of Italy’s fractured wartime identity, but through its anthological structure, also examines those tragedies, sacrifices, and cross-cultural connections inevitably swallowed by the indifferent sweep of history.
-
Ju Dou (1990)
Cycles of trauma are never fully broken in Ju Dou’s family dynamics of abusive marriages, affairs, and resentful children, each generation echoing the violence of the last, while Zhang Yimou’s visual poetry heightens such tragic, historic resonance.
-
Obsession (2025)
Love stripped of consent warps into a demonic force in Obsession, and through one man’s reckless wish for absolute devotion, Curry Barker exposes the insidious, consuming violence of its coercive fulfilment.
-
Red Sorghum (1988)
Red Sorghum’s step back into modern Chinese history deserves the poetic treatment of a folk epic for Yimou Zhang, as this ancestral fable intimately bridges the distance between generations, and paints rural vitality and resistance in lush, expressive brushstrokes.
-
The Man From London (2007)
Sensationalist thrills are entirely drained from The Man from London’s crime plot of drowned bodies and stolen cash, as Béla Tarr instead establishes an aesthetic distance from its bleak chain of events, and turns his probing, glacial camera towards the moral vacancy of its lifeless seaport.
-
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Perhaps the mass media didn’t directly create mass murderers Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, but Oliver Stone certainly exposes its complicity in their myth-making, screaming a brazen, self-flagellating indictment of pop-cultural cannibalism in neon, blood, and hyper-kinetic chaos.
-
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)
That Lee Cronin’s The Mummy should include its creator’s name is an audacious move for an emerging director, yet in staging a young girl’s demonic possession against her parents’ anguish, Cronin’s deterioration of the family unit begins to justify the claim of auteurship.
-
War and Peace (1965-67)
Committing a nation’s full resources, unprecedented technical ambition, and avant-garde flair to Russia’s greatest literary treasure, Sergei Bondarchuk crafts an astonishing cinematic translation of War and Peace, making the vast sweep of history answer to Leo Tolstoy’s humanist philosophy.
-
The Home and the World (1984)
It is easy to be swept away by the vibrant, opulent melodrama of The Home and the World, as Satyajit Ray renders the clash of ideologies as both a national and profoundly private battle, entangling one impressionable housewife in a politically-charged affair.
