Vision

In three parts, with multiple stories, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ epic Arabian Nights was easily the most original, ambitious – and most critically acclaimed – film at Cannes this year.

In three parts, with multiple stories, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ epic Arabian Nights was easily the most original, ambitious – and most critically acclaimed – film at Cannes this year.

In three parts, with multiple stories, Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ epic Arabian Nights was easily the most original, ambitious – and most critically acclaimed – film at Cannes this year.

An exuberant return for veteran Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, this mock historical epic-cum-freeform documentary tells the story of Enrique of Malacca, who was arguably the first person to circumnavigate the earth.

A hospital full of sleeping soldiers is haunted by matters both historical and intensely personal in the latest gentle and entrancingly beautiful cinematic enigma from the Thai Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Sidse Babett Knudsen from Borgen and Chiara D’Anna star as lovers locked in a game of mistress and servant in this consummately coutured, surreal fantasy inspired by European soft-core of the 70s.

A demented mash up of lurid, long-lost movies that never existed, this new work from Canadian genius Guy Maddin plunges a starry art house cast into phantasmagorical scenarios of melodramatic weirdness.

“Paul Thomas Anderson has taken Thomas Pynchon’s novel about the death of the hippie counterculture and turned it, reasonably faithfully, into a surreally funny, anxious and beautiful film noir.” — The Telegraph

Viggo Mortensen is a Danish engineer who adopts military garb to search for his fugitive daughter in in the wilderness of 19th-century Patagonia. Lisandro Alonso’s surreal drama is as enigmatic as it is compelling.

The deeply eccentric Roy Andersson’s meticulously mounted comic sketches move from historic fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as he muses on humanity’s inescapable absurdity. Golden Lion, Best Film, Venice Film Festival 2014.

Filmed over nine months of night shoots, the hypnotically immersive Tchoupitoulas shows us nightlife in and around New Orleans’ French Quarter through the eyes of astounded children.

In the near future a cast of unrelated characters come together in the ghostly shadow of an unfinished skyscraper on a desolate Russian plain. “A ravishingly shot, thought-provoking triumph.” —Screendaily

In this affecting documentary portrait of a latter-day cowboy and lawman, the peace of two small cattle towns on opposite sides of the Texas–Mexico border is threatened by the shadow of Mexican drug cartels.