The first time I watched Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty, I was electrified. Even on successive viewings it continues to leave me exhilarated in its hyperbolic and acerbic portrayal of Rome’s literati glitterati. The film gestures towards a recurring idea in Sorrentino’s body of work – the exploration of beauty and decay mostly through…
Beyond the titles featured in our 2025 preview of global independent and arthouse cinema for the first half of the year, there is a gamut of imaginative, accomplished works to look out for during the rest of 2025. A vast cross-section of these feature films — from promising debut directors to veterans of the industry — will…
The opening pages of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection are lavished with an itemised description of a chic apartment complete with Scandinavian furniture, a geometric berber rug, lush monstera plants and past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked neatly. Originally written and published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022, Perfection is a slim novel…
The first thing that Boutheina Ben Salem remembers cooking was makrouna, Tunisia’s cherished pasta dish. She wanted to surprise her mother, who was returning from a trip. As her mother stepped into the house, she recognised by the aroma that the sauce was missing bay leaf. Ben Salem was sent outside to clear her nose…
Bangkok: The city summons a set of preconceptions for the first-time traveller. Chaotic, unrelenting, hedonistic. But most cities exist in the gaps between binaries. In my years spent living and wandering in Bangkok, I have grown to appreciate a metropolis that is abundant in life, creativity and industriousness. The impact of mass tourism is indelible…
2025 holds great promise for global independent and arthouse cinema from the return of old masters to a rich trove of breakthroughs by debut directors. Many of these films have received critical acclaim at film festivals while others have been flying a bit under the radar. Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof) In Farsi…
I’m a big fan of this manifesto against best of the year lists, which applies as much to film as it does to books and restaurants. Since many of the sources of our collective pleasures are hard to reduce to a subjective opinion on contemporaneity and relevance within a given year. In the spirit of…
What lingers most from my year of going to the cinema in 2024 is not a particular image but an experience of time—or rather, several experiences of time as explored by filmmakers across the decades through a cultural and political inquiry into the intimate lives of women in various parts of Asia. This selection of…