Faratyev’s Fantasies [1982] – ★★★★

Soviet director Ilya Averbakh (1934-1986) was first a doctor, having finished a medical degree, and only then a director, and perhaps that is why many of his films are characterised by certain exactness, almost medical precision, and clarity of vision. They also lean towards Chekhovian pathos (incidentally, Chekhov was also a doctor first), and try to distil the tragedy of individual life full of intellectual pursuits, sensitivity and soulfulness vis-à-vis daily brutal realities surrounding it.…

The Brutalist [2024] – ★★★1/2

If The Pianist (2002) was Paris’s Notre-Dame de Paris, a soulful meditation on human struggle and condition, then The Brutalist is London’s Barbican Centre – empty in everything but performance and concrete image. It is an audacious construction of a film that, like much of modern architecture, is soulless. Directed by Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux), the film centres on Hungarian-Jewish survivor of a Nazi concentration camp and architect László Tóth…

La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) [1939] – ★★★★★

This film is, arguably, Jean Renoir’s greatest achievement. In the story, a circle of rich socialites meets up in a country house of Christine and her husband Robert de la Cheyniest. The complications then follow as it becomes apparent that aviator André Jurieux is deeply in love with Christine, and Christine’s own husband, Robert, is entangled in a love affair of his own. Coupled with this, Christine’s personal…

The Beasts [2022] – ★★★★1/2

True horror lies not in the actual presentation of the said horror, but in the certainty of its imminent arrival, in the feelings of expectation, the wait and the dread…persistent, insidious, mentally-torturous. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen knows exactly how to portray this most effectively on screen since his slow-burn drama-thriller The Beasts (As bestas) is one highly palpable, mesmerizingly ensnaring exploration of psychological persecution and bullying, grounded in stark realism. When French couple Antoine and…