Part 4 the editors January 2026 World Poll Issue 116 ENTRIES IN PART 4: Sean Gilman Antony I. Ginnane Leonardo Goi Leo Goldsmith Andrew Goode Jared Gores Mary Graham Michael Granados Francesco GriecoAndy Hazel Michael Heath William Heidbreder Maggie Hennefeld Alain Hertay David Heslin Lee Hill David Hollingsworth Kierran A. Horner Sean Gilman Film Critic (thechinesecinema.com) These are ten of the best movies that I watched for the first time in 2025. Riraito (Rewrite, Matsui Daigo, Japan, 2025) Matsui’s film, from a script by Ueda Makoto (Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, River, Night is Short Walk on Girl), is the latest attempt to grapple with Tsutsui Yasutaka’s novel The Girl Who Leapt through Time, following acclaimed ones by Obayashi Nobuhiko and Mamoru Hosada among many others. It’s a work that seems as inexhaustible in its possibilities as cinema and time itself. Beibi Warukyûre Eburidei! (Baby Assassins Everyday!, Sakamoto Yugo, Japan 2024) CITY the Animation (Ichidate Taichi, Japan, 2025) Two of the best films of the year also happened to stream episodically. Sakamoto’s Baby Assassins continue their struggle to carve out a place for themselves within the contradictions and inanities of the adult world, while Kyoto Animation offers its most utopian vision of modern life, one built as much on delightful absurdity as freedom and community. Nü da xue sheng su she (Girl Student’s’ Dormitory, Shi Shujun, China, 1983) Shi Shujun’s drama is one of the great lost films of 80s China, the missing link between the Mainland’s 4th and 5th Generations and Taiwan’s New Cinema. As far as I know, it’s only been screened abroad at one small festival in New York, as part of a series of films set in Wuhan. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2025) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, USA, 2025) Good year for big Hollywood hits that Hollywood didn’t want to be hits. Kyo no Sora ga Ichiban Suki, to Mada Ienai Boku wa (She Taught Me Serendipity, Ohku Akiko, Japan, 2024) Ohku continues to be the modern master of romance. This one is more grounded and dramatic than some of her more fanciful work, with big monologues for each of her three stars. Pair it with James L. Brooks’s Ella McCay for a double feature by people who still believe in people. Dushi fengguang (Scenes of City Life, Yuan Muzhi, China, 1935) Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, Bi Gan, China, 2025) Bi Gan’s bag of movie tricks is deep and undeniably impressive, but so was Yuan Muzhi’s. Sebunsu kôdo (Seventh Code, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Japan, 2013) I like to imagine Maeda Atsuko is reprising her character in this in the Baby Assassins series. Maybe in To the Ends of the Earth as well. . . Antony I. Ginnane Melbourne born Antony I. Ginnane has produced or executive produced 73 feature films, MOW’s, miniseries and TV series over 53 years. Top 10 (Eligibility: 2025 films in theatrical, festival, premiere DVD or VOD or streaming first release in the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand) listed alphabetically by title: A House Of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025) Bigelow again presents as one of the greatest action directors currently working. Her Rashomon’ like 3-part construction of a pending nuclear disaster is tightly cut, beautifully cast and harrowing to the end. Anora (Sean Baker, 2025) Sean Barker’s anarchic screwball comedy romance moves at a cracking pace with a standout performance by Mikey Madison. A Godardian color scheme powers a sense of humanism. Black Bag (Steven Soderberg, 2025) Soderbergh plays in the espionage subgenre, this time with a great script by David Koepp and a top cast with led by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as husband and wife spies. A slick, twist filled narrative blends with an Agatha Christie reveal. Dossier 137 (Case 137, Dominik Moll, 2025) A French noir focusing on police brutality and corruption and a hero forced to reconcile race, class and gender against the background of the yellow vest protests. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025) Another screwball tale about a young Jewish New Yorker on the make who’s chasing love and ping pong championships. Abel Ferrara is hilarious. Safdie’s characters never stop. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) A nostalgia laden recap of the making of Godard’s “Breathless”. Linklater catches the manic enthusiasm and restrained explanations Goddard exhibits. Filled with cinema references we know and love. It’s a memoir of a magic time. Nu Astepa Prea Muit De La Sfarsitul Lumil (Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World, Radu Jude, 2023) Radu Jude throws experimental style together with protest sentiment re the state of politics in contemporary Romania with a kinetic style inked with bizarre humour. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Nonstop action blended with political comments, strong performances and a taught visual style, P.T. Anderson connects with the cultural wars, criticises the right and the left and suggests a future of struggle. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) A horror movie with multiple twists, blending vampires with the black community in the South straight after World War One. Coogler mixes the epic and the intimate with an extraordinary collection of offbeat characters. The Order (Justin Kurzel, 2024) Kurzel gives us a tough police procedural set in the US in the 80s against a background of rising white supremacists. A burnt out FBI agent manages to bring down his surprisingly similar nemesis and regain his sense of worth. Leonardo Goi Festivals editor at Senses of Cinema, columnist and critic at MUBI Notebook, regular contributor to The Film Stage, Reverse Shot, Filmmaker, Film Comment, et al. Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra, 2024) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025) In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinksi, 2025) Le città di pianura (The Last One for the Road, Francesco Sossai, 2025) Eojjeolsugaeopda (No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook, 2025) Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin, 2025) One Battle After Another Leo Goldsmith Assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and a programming advisor for The New York Film Festival. Levers (Rhayne Vermette, 2025) Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025) Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics (Victor Van Rossem, 2025) The Wayfinders (Peggy Ahwesh, 2025) Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025) Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, Christian Petzold, 2025) Tôsô (Escape, Masao Adachi, 2025) Evidence (Lee Anne Schmitt, 2025) Dooni (Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, 2025) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Andrew Goode Marketing and Theatrical Manager at Hi Gloss Entertainment My top films and my favourite discovery. Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) Bi Gan is one of the best directors around and this monumental ode to cinema feels like a turning point for arthouse cinema more broadly. The last hour is pure “kino,” and to see it both in Cannes and at the IMAX Carlton was an honour. Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025) I’ve been to events like the ones depicted in this film and Laxe’s portrayal of the hedonistic and somewhat selfish world of durational partying in the desert (or bush for Australia’s case) is painfully accurate. But crucially, Laxe’s depiction is without a trace of malice, which greatly humanises a hugely misunderstood subculture and hence the character’s actions. After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino, 2025) An exceptionally smart cautionary tale with an even better selection of music, I feel many people mistake Luca Guadagnino’s Italian sensibility for his politics and unfairly wrote off this film as such. Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025) A truly biting satire that depicts the post-covid international era with painful precision. One of the year’s best films. Kokuhō (Kokuho, Lee Sang-il, 2025) The best kabuki film i’ve ever seen. A Japanese version of William A. Wellman’s 1939 A Star is Born that fills its three-hour run time with mesmeric movement, sound and colour. One of the great modern epic films. Ken! (Yes!, Nadav Lapid, 2025) Yet another satire on this list. The film was greatly overlooked in Cannes and thereafter but I hope and suspect it will become an important piece of protest cinema in these troubling times. Magic Farm (Amalia Ulman, 2025) To quote Sydney’s pre-eminent programmer and critic Luke Goodsell, this film should be called ‘The Discreet Charm of the Indie Sleeze’. Like Eddington and After the Hunt, this film is a reaction to a unique, hyper-specific unparalleled moment in time (the post-COVID internet era) that needed to be truly lived to be understood. Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus, 2024) This bleak film screened at the Brunswick Underground Film Festival and will forever stay with me. I’ve never felt such a distinct sense of empathy for a character that is so deeply unlike me. Although I hope to never watch this film again, I know it will stay with me far longer than most other films I’ve seen in 2025. Cover-Up (Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 2025) Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ ode to Seymour Hersh is an important reminder and celebration of the rockstars that are investigative journalists. One can only hope that Netflix can introduce Hersh and the many atrocities he uncovered to the entire world. Favourite Discovery: Strange Days (Katheryn Bigelow, 1995) An enjoyable and sexy millennium romp written by the great Jim Cameron and directed by the greater Katheryn Bigelow. Strange Days explores race, police brutality, technology, modernism, dance music and romance with an unparalleled focus. Truly one of the great techno-futurist films and, for that matter, “new year’s eve” films. Jared Gores Documentary Producer and Film Podcaster in San Francisco Favourite films of the year, loosely ranked: One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) Ástin sem eftir er (The Love that Remains, Hlynur Pálmason, 2025) Eojjeolsugaeopda (No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook, 2025) Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025) Sinners Mary Graham Author, A Stunning Backdrop: Alberta in the Movies, 1917 – 1960 Dusk & Dawn (Roseanne Supernault, 2025) This first feature from Cree filmmaker Roseanne Supernault blows up every movie cliche about Indigenous women. Finally. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025) Hauntingly human. Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) I cried. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Good fun. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) Fascinating. Michael Granados Film Critic based in Los Angeles, Film Fest Report Ástin sem eftir er (The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason, 2025) Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025) Estrany riu (Stranger River, Jaume Claret Muxart, 2025) Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch, 2025) Ken! (Yes!, Nadav Lapid, 2025) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks, Lucrecia Martel, 2025) O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest In The Storm, Pedro Pinho, 2025) El príncipe de Nanawa (The Prince of Nanawa, Clarisa Navas, 2025) Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025) FRANCESCO GRIECO Member of the selection committee for the Venice International Film Critics’ Week (SIC) Films released in 2025: O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron, 2025) Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025) Dream of Another Summer (Irene Bartolomé, 2025) Magalhães (Magellan, Lav Diaz, 2025) Older films encountered for the first time this year: Atanarjuat (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982) Neitoperho (The Collector, Auli Mantila, 1997) Simone Barbès ou la vertu (Simone Barbes or Virtue, Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980) When the Wind Blows (Jimmy T. Murakami, 1986) In-person, online or hybrid events I attended: The wonderful retrospective dedicated to Kenneth Anger and curated by Cecilia Ermini in Bologna (Archivio Aperto Festival) Andy Hazel Senior editorial producer at The Saturday Paper, an international voting member of the Golden Globes, and a board member of the Australian Film Critics Association. Eojjeolsugaeopda (No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook, 2025) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025) Sorry Baby (Eva Victor, 2025) In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinksi, 2025) Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) 100 Sunset (Kunsang Kyirong, 2025) First Light (James J. Robinson, 2025) Yek tasadof-e sadeh (It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi, 2025) Twinless (James Sweeney, 2025) Michael Heath Screenwriter, Documentary and Independent Film-Maker and Cinephile, Raumati South, Aotearoa / New Zealand. 10 unforgettable experiences of 2025: Dry Leaf (Alexander Koberidze, 2025) Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025) Tóc, Giấy và Nước… (Hair, Paper, Water…, Nicolas Graux and Minh Quy Trương, 2025) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Asu wa Nipponbare (The Weather Will be Fine Tomorrow, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1948) Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) Ástin sem eftir er (The Love that Remains, Hlynur Pálmason, 2025) Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, Christian Petzold, 2025) Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does that Nature Say to You, Hong sang-Soo, 2025) Natsu No Niwa (The Friends, Shinji Somai, 1994) Sirāt William Heidbreder Writer and actor who lives in New York City. 1. One Battle after Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) The palpably hateful character of the American military state, necessitating an improbably successful opposition to justify its rule of terror, situates some tragicomic follies (and tentative successes) of radical politics, at its center an eroticized racial war concluding with a stunning corporate office holocaust. The cinematic social historian of California again adapting a literary one, Thomas Pynchon, here the almost typologically apt portrayals compose a compellingly recognizable image of an extended 1970 as background to our now. 2. Astenicheskiy sindrom (Asthenic Syndrome, Kira Muratova, 1989) Caps, and tops, the European cinema of late-Cold War alienation and disenchantment that flourished in the decade whose end was marked by that of official socialism, with pointless rage and narcoleptic dysphoria as protest. 3. C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, Leos Carax, 2024) In following Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-98) by interrogating cinema’s relationship to history, in a poetic visual essay that uses montage to evoke enigmas centering the Shoah, modern France, and looming fascisms, and that proposes the author’s identity as question in this context, rarely is film as social commentary more lyrically mordant. 4. Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, Bi Gan, 2025) Scenes of trauma from select moments of China’s last hundred years in a bittersweet paean to forms of sensually lived experience, with which one who discovers cinema and one who lives in it must tarry, in a passion affirming the mnemonic conscience of mortal suffering in the face of our indifferently prosperous administered world. 5. Myrni liudy (Intercepted, Oksana Karpovych, 2024) The mania of war and its devastation: In a formally perfect manner that is readily generalizable, this film about Ukraine under Russian invasion uses the modernist trope of juxtaposing modes of presentation to contrast devastated living spaces with an intercepted call soundtrack of babbling mothers encouraging soldiers in dehumanizing rhetoric. 6. Yūkoku (Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death, Yukio Mishima, 1966) Minimalist filmed dance, set to Wagner’s Liebstod, imagining the realized act of love as a performance of power and sacrifice, its double suicide focusing on the male body’s martial discipline. 7. L’Homme à la valise (Man with a Suitcase, Chantal Akerman, 1983) This minimalist story involving a man in an empty office space was among the revelations of MoMA’s complete retrospective of this greatest of experimental and narrative visual examiners of contemporary life. 8. Fēng liú yī dài (Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke, 2024) With appropriate visual melancholy Tao Zhao, alter-ego of China’s cinematic social historian Jia, is witness to what development’s give and take may leave one struggling to understand. 9. Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín, 2010) Tense portrayal of shaken cowardly loner with leftism as celebrity corpse he must examine, hospitals as sites for staging live massacres, and a pleading married neighbor to be entombed alive. 10. Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1973) Maybe the greatest downer road trip of female working-class life. Maggie Hennefeld Professor, Cinephile, and Archival Film Curator – Minneapolis, MN. Dreams, Ghosts, Hallucinations. *When I go to the movies, I expect to tango with ghosts. Undead, reborn, vengeful, soulful, flickering, uncanny – beautiful ghosts. That’s what it means to me to feel haunted by cinema, to give yourself up as a vessel for past selves unresolved or old dreams unfulfilled. Of the 372 films I’ve watched this year (according to Letterboxd), these ones made my imagination run wild. Japanese Paper Films (Various, 1932 – 1938) Produced on paper instead of celluloid, Japanese studios churned out short, animated larks featuring metamorphic racoon dogs, decapitated samurai, and line-dancing octopods. Eric Faden curated a beautiful program of digitized prints for the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone– with live music by Yoko Kimura and Hikaru Tamaki! Palestine – A Revised Narrative (Cynthia Zaven, 2024) Re-edited footage shot in Palestine during World War I explodes into a new text, sourced from archives preserved by the Imperial War Museum. Cynthia Zaven disturbs the colonizer’s gaze with her searing montage and sound design by Rana Eid. Miss Harry’s Femme Serpent (Unknown, 1911) Imagine a contortionist snake lady slithering acrobatically across a 235-square-meter screen on the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna! Did I mention the bright emerald and gold stenciled colors? Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) Projected on 35mm by the Cult Film Collective at the Trylon Cinema, this pre-Code sex comedy sizzles with irresistible adultery, recreational narcotics, hot jazz, and one of the most inventive uses of lipstick I’ve ever seen on film. Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025) Last in first out, I streamed this recently on MUBI. I relished every second of Ramsay’s dryly funny drama about post-partum depression and bitter self-isolation. The scene when Jennifer Lawrence buys boxed mac and cheese at a gas station is my favorite in recent memory. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (Leslie Harris, 1993) Streaming on the Criterion Channel in a program dedicated to First Features by Black Women Directors, this tour-de-force debut by Leslie Harris is equal parts devastating and hilarious. Shot on location in Brooklyn, it bursts with contagious will and defiant laughter. L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica (The Illustrious Actress Cicala Formica, Lucio D’Ambra, 1920) A meta-comedy diva film about an Italian woman whose dreams of becoming a movie star are foiled by the inexperience of her camera operator. Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention, Elia Suleiman, 2003) I rewatched it at a free outdoor screening in the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. In this black comedy about border checkpoints, a peach pit blows up an army tank and a female ninja destroys an Israeli helicopter with a shield in the shape of a Palestinian flag. Absurdism wears thin to depict the current horrors, but there’s always hope on hand in the archive. The Nightshift (Robina Rose, 1981) I missed it at my rep theater but was happy to catch it on Criterion. Starring punk icon Jordan as a West London hotel receptionist, this dreamy surrealist feature is pure cinematic hallucination. Alain Hertay Teaches cinema studies at the Haute Ecole de la Province de Liège, Belgium. Contributor to La Furia Umana, Culturopoing, POPNews and Flashback Magazine./h5> 10 favourite new release films from 2025: One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024) Dossier 137 (Case 137, Dominik Moll, 2025) A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024) L’acier a coulé dans nos veines (Steel running through our veins, Christine Pireaux et Thierry Michel, 2024) A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025) Ṣawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) Partir un jour (Leave One Day, Amélie Bonnin, 2025) Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025) David Heslin Critic, editor and publications manager at Melbourne International Film Festival Best new films of 2025: 1. La tour de glace (The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2025) 2. Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025) 3. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024) 4. Urchin (Harris Dickinson, 2025) 5. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024) 6. First Light (James J. Robinson, 2025) 7. Ástin sem eftir er (The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason, 2025) 8. Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024) 9. O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm, Pedro Pinho, 2025) 10. Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025) The Love That Remains Lee Hill Author of the updated and revised Easy Rider: A BFI Classic due May 2026. Top Ten (no order): (tie) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) and Eddington (Ari Aster) House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow) The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) Miroirs No.3 (Christian Petzold) Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV, Rebecca Miller) Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater) Cover-Up (Mark Obenhaus, Laura Poitras) Amadeus (4K reissue, Milos Forman, 1984) J’accuse (An Officer and A Spy, Roman Polanski, 2019) Notes: Movies… now more expensive and unseen than ever. With apologies to Griffin Mills, that could be the tag line for the Year in Film 2025, when even a Box Office Maestro like Tom Cruise struggles to bring in the crowds or the big autumn Oscar bait release makes one muse “isn’t this just Vanishing Point with politics and a mega catering budget?” A lot of money was thrown at movies, but to modest material or aesthetic benefit. The increasing dominance of streamers like Netflix at film festivals and the insidious nature of AI are also making the cinema experience feel endangered. Yet I feel encouraged by the cinephilia of younger audiences – the love for Barry Lyndon, for example – and the recognition that film history has almost always turned crisis into opportunity. Take a sad song and make it better indeed. David Hollingsworth Cinephile/Film Reviewer for Cinema Sentries Favorite Films of 2025: 1) Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025) 2) One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) 3) Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro, 2025) 4) Bring Her Back (Michael Philippou, Danny Philippou, 2025) 5) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) Favorite First-Time Watches of 2025: 1) La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustache, 1973) An epic film about a self-important and toxic intellectual (which Jean-Pierre Leaud is famous for playing in many films) and the two complex and interesting women who see right through his nonsense. Has all the hallmarks of French cinema: sustained, long takes, staggering angst, and lots of dialogue, but goes for the jugular with raw, raunchy, and confessional language that feels cuttingly modern. 2) Compensation (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999) A beautiful piece of American independent filmmaking that combines the Black experience/history and the lives of the deaf community into something real and refreshing. 3) Vestida de Azul (Dressed in Blue, Antonio Gimenez-Rico, 1983) A huge revelation for me. A frank (and sometimes graphic) documentary about strong trans women in post-franco Spain that is fearless, freeing, and incredibly frank. 4) One Potato, Two Potato (Larry Peerce, 1964) A bold and uncompromising portrait of interracial romance that feels so real and stripped down that it seeps into your skin and stays there. And the ending is a stone-cold bummer. Barbara Barrie is an unsung hero of film, and her performance is incredible in it. 5) Shonen (Boy, Nagisa Oshima, 1969) A disturbing and disturbingly funny tale that pulls no punches and leaves no stone unturned, even with the lives of children. And it has one of the most startling performances from a child actor (Tetsuo Abe, who surprisingly never made another film) I’ve ever seen. Kierran A. Horner Film scholar and writer based in London Five Released this year: Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025) Like the illumined tracking shots of the eponymous, skipping I-Jing through Taipei’s night-markets, Tsou’s reflective surfaces gradually welcome the audience through the looking glass into an interior of deception and corrupted innocence. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024) Opening with depictions of muscled flesh with an intimate, undulating and venous foreshadowing, Glass’s ominous, body-horror thriller literally strains at the seams of its genre costume as a feminist myth of loyalty, and love smashes testosterone-fed brutality. Kaj ti je deklica (Little Trouble Girls, Urška Djukić, 2025) A choirmaster symbolises the authority that defines femaleness, especially within roles of virgin and whore, while one girl’s burgeoning sexual desire ebbs against such restrictions in a beauteous debut film. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) Set at a canny juncture, a paradigmatic ponderous pace and pretermitted framing deconstruct audience expectations of the heist sub-genre in Reichardt’s autumn-hued contemplation of one man’s ambling erasure, a nation’s nascent sundering through saturating egoism and expectations of expedited success. September Says (Ariane Labed, 2024) Employing a subtlety wanting in her husband’s recent cinema, Labed translates Daisy Johnson’s tale of a supernatural, sororal bond into something more quotidian and yet just as disquieting and sensitive to the spectral intimacy and pain and of familial relations and the insidious impacts of intolerance. Five seen for the first time this year: Baibai rabu (Bye Bye Love, Isao Fujisawa, 1974) Fujisawa takes pop-shots at the genre, hitting targets Godard missed a decade previously, and queers the road-trip narrative with the introduction of a central character with a gender as fluid as the unbounded voyage that they and their outlaw partner take through contemporary Japan. In (Letícia Parente, 1975) With a personification of women’s bodies as defined by the domestic chores and social roles they are expected to perform, like contemporaries such as Linder (‘Pretty Girls’) or Martha Rosler (‘Damp Meat’), Parente employs an acerbic eye to gender, applying a tenebrous coda with allusions to a tragic end. Chibusa yo eien nare (The Eternal Breasts, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955) Adapting melodrama to a critique of a nation’s expectations of femininity, Tanaka’s film focuses on individual, indomitable artistic desire, the last scenes as finely balanced – between high emotions and erudite censure – as to replicate the harmony of the tanka poetry that inspires them. Een vrouw als Eva (A Woman Like Eve, Nouchka van Brakel, 1979) Playing with a queering of the stories of Eve and Lilith, Brakel’s lesbian love story dances through the fluctuations of Schneider’s irascible Lilith emancipating Van de Ven’s Eve from patriarchal confines and the authoritarian and ignorant response to such independence. Nightshift (Robina Rose, 1981) An allegorical social snapshot, opening with a static camera from Jordan’s hotel night-clerk’s POV into which punk-Bressonian guests hover into shot like somnambulists and ceding midway to a montage inside the rooms of tableaux vivants (like Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton) and uncanny slo-mo scenes of abandon.
