Perfect Days (2023)
★★★★☆
Perfect Days is acclaimed director Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set film for which Koji Yakusho won a well-deserved Best Actor award.
Germany
The Settlers (2023) (Los Colonos)
★★★☆☆
The Settlers is an angry, violent Western-type version of the brutal colonial birth of Chile by first-time filmmaker Felipe Gálvez.
Padre Pio (2022)
★★★★☆
Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio links religious fervour, the growth of fascism and socialism, and the Ukraine invasion, and is based on true events culminating on 14 October 1920.
Fallen Leaves (2023) (Kuolleet lehdet)
★★★★☆
Fallen Leaves is Aki Kaurismäki’s drily touching film of a kind of love story amid the grinding reality of life.
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
★★★★☆
Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s Palme d’or winner, stars Sandra Hüller in a gripping, ambiguous puzzle of a courtroom drama.
Passages (2023)
★★★★☆
Passages is Ira Sachs’ toxic European love triangle set in Paris, starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
La Syndicaliste (2022)
★★★★☆
Isabelle Huppert stars in Jean-Paul Salomé’s thriller and nuclear-industry investigation La Syndicaliste, based on the recent true story of French union official Maureen Kearney.
Pacifiction: Tourment sur les îles (2022)
★★★★☆
Pacifiction, a hypnotically paced, dark political thriller set in French Tahiti directed by Catalan Albert Serra, enjoys the Polynesian island’s beauty, but also its inherent vulnerability to threats.
Holy Spider (Ankabut-e moqaddas) (2022)
★★★★☆
Holy Spider, angrily written and directed by Ali Abbasi (Border), is a grisly, reality-based story of violence against women in a patriarchal, theocratic society.
Peter von Kant (2022)
★★★☆☆
Peter von Kant is a gender-flipped re-imagining by François Ozon of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 classic power play of sexual obsession The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Corsage (2022)
★★★★☆
A compelling woman-led re-imagining of the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer and starring Vicky Krieps.
Triangle of Sadness (2021)
★★★★☆
Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Ôstland’s second Palme d’or winner, is an uncompromising black contemporary satire.
BFI LFF 2022: Triangle of Sadness
★★★★☆
Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Ôstland’s second Palme d’or winner screening at the BFI LFF 2022 on 11 and 12 October 2022 , is an uncompromising blackly contemporary satire.
BFI LFF 2022: Pacifiction
★★★★☆
BFI LFF 2022: Pacifiction, a hypnotically paced, dark political thriller set in French Tahiti, directed by Catalan Albert Serra, enjoys the Polynesian island’s beauty, but also its inherent vulnerability to outside geo-political threats.