Colours of Time (2025)

Direction: Cédric Klapisch
Country: France / Belgium

Colours of Time is an absolutely delightful and mesmerizing impressionistic tale, packed with history and an invigorating sense of adventure and discovery. Co-writer and director Cédric Klapisch (The Spanish Apartment, 2002; Rise, 2022) knows how to draw out charm through a compelling narrative structure, well-chosen environments, and bright, luminous visuals.

In this period drama, four distant cousins—young digital creator Seb (Abraham Wapler), soon-to-retire teacher Abdel (Zinedine Soualem), workaholic businesswoman Céline (Julia Piaton), and easygoing beekeeper Guy (Vincent Macaigne)—hit it off surprisingly well after meeting for the first time in Paris, summoned by a governmental agency interested in purchasing the house of an ancestor, Adèle Meunier (Suzanne Lindon). Alternating between past and present, with Paris as the central axis, the film also follows Adèle’s inspiring 19th-century journey as she leaves Normandy in search of her mother (Sara Giraudeau).

Impeccable production design and period detail make the film beautiful as a painting, and the smooth transitions between eras are particularly notable. Driven by a love of art and by Lindon’s charming performance, Colours of Time unfolds gently—subtly mixing humor and emotion in satisfying doses and using feel-good ingredients to explore what binds people together in a warm, perceptive portrayal of human relationships.

The script, which could easily sit alongside Alain Resnais’ lighter works, earns its own originality through its endearing characters and narrative fluidity. It marks an ambitious return for Klapisch, who invites us to look at life with renewed tenderness and understanding. This is truly great cinema, reminding us of the enduring impact of ancestry on our lives.

The Ice Tower (2025)

Direction: Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Country: France 

Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s new feature, The Ice Tower, is a contemplative and gloomy fairytale that reaches gothic proportions by playing with shadows and immersing itself in dark, anguished atmospheres. However, this mise-en-abyme exercise, set in the ’70s, nearly exhausts itself in artifice. Adopting experimental, surreal, and glacial tones, this fantasy drama strikes with emotional cruelty—a bleak blend of strange passions, obsession, motherless trauma, and inharmonious relationships. The controversial filmmaker Gaspar Noé—Hadzihalilovic’s partner in real life—makes a cameo appearance, while Marion Cotillard reunites with the director 21 years after their first collaboration, Innocence (2004).

The script, co-written by Hadzihalilovic and Geoff Cox, draws an obvious connection to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, while its cinematic influences range from Black Narcissus (1947) to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) to The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Never rushing its narrative flow, The Ice Tower follows a runaway 15-year-old orphan, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who takes refuge in the film studio where volatile actress Cristina Van Den Berg (Cotillard) is shooting The White Snow. Drawn to one another, they develop a very strange bond.

This is one of the oddest, most outrageous, and most disproportionate films to emerge this year—a beguiling mix of art and fantasy, psychic dissonance, and shattered mirrors that yields yet another intriguingly peculiar experience. It is, however, a difficult film to watch, and not as captivating as Hadzihalilovic’s previous feature, Earwig (2021). Technically well made, it is not particularly enjoyable at its core, limned with bitter rawness and marked by loneliness and despair that can be terrifying. But does its dreamlike, phantasmagoric aura carry us anywhere more profound than the merely artistic? Not quite. The narrative eventually freezes, suffocating without knowing where to go next. It’s a film that transfixes more than it enchants.

Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) (2025)

Direction: Sierra Falconer
Country: USA 

Executive produced by Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, 2019), Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is a soulful five-vignette anthology directed by newcomer Sierra Falcone. The semi-autobiographical film, built around coming-of-age themes, follows a 14-year-old girl who discovers a love of sailing while staying with her grandparents after her mother’s recent remarriage; a young violinist striving to excel at a summer music camp under the pressure of his ambitious mother; a brief, tragic romance between a dreamy fisherman and a rebellious young woman; and the deep bond between two sisters who run a bed-and-breakfast on Michigan’s Green Lake.

Through carefully framed shots and a cohesive ensemble cast, Falcone tackles mature themes while maintaining a gentle patina of softness across the film. There is a generosity of spirit and a sense of lived experience that lift Sunfish above more conventional indie dramas. The screenplay’s objectivity and simplicity may frustrate viewers seeking denser plotting, but Falcone has an undeniable gift for tuning into deftly tactful wavelengths, rendering each story with a delicate, warm sensibility.

These modest, uncynical tales make space for compassion—occasionally moving, never manipulative. The actors bring nuance and vitality, often adding just when the film seems to risk subtracting from itself.

The Smashing Machine (2025)

Direction: Bennie Safdie
Country: USA 

In his first film without his brother Josh, Bennie Safdie (Daddy Longlegs, 2009; Uncut Gems, 2019) turns to the true story of former wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr, reconstructing key events—between 1997 and 2000—of his professional and personal life with with the relaxed, comfortable posture of an alternative sports biopic. Safdie casts Dwayne Johnson—here boasting an intimidating, Herculean presence—in the lead role, with Emily Blunt as Kerr’s selfish yet intermittently supportive girlfriend. Double-time Bellator MMA champion Ryan Bader appears as Kerr’s best friend Mark Coleman, while Dutch MMA former champion Bas Rutten, who trained Kerr in real life, plays himself.

Buoyed by terrific lead performances, The Smashing Machine avoids pushing the drama into radical territory, instead adopting a mildly superficial stance toward adversity. Although well shot, the fighting scenes lack visceral bite and could have carried more tension. Ultimately, this is a compact, low-key film that resists showiness. Safdie—who also wrote, produced, and edited—doesn’t inject new life into the familiar framework. It’s Johnson, vigorously supported by Blunt, who keeps the film afloat with a ferocious, career-expanding performance, breaking free from his usual screen persona and delivering a convincing portrayal of Kerr in a successful turn toward dramatic acting.

The Smashing Machine, overshadowed by John Hyams’ 2002 documentary of the same name, sometimes feels like a re-enacted documentary, following a classic, predictable narrative path. It’s a minor biopic with a satisfying retro flavor—one we watch without either great enthusiasm or boredom.

The Summer Book (2025)

Direction: Charlie McDowell
Country: UK / USA / Finland

Directed by Charlie McDowell (The One I Love, 2014; Windfall, 2022), written by Robert Jones, and starring and co-produced by Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction, 1987; Dangerous Liaisons, 1988), The Summer Book is a bland adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel of the same name. It follows a grandmother (Close) and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia (Emily Matthews), as they spend the summer on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. The young girl and her emotionally distant father (Anders Danielsen Lie), a busy yet lonely illustrator, are still grieving the loss of her mother and his wife, respectively.

Emotional fragility and occasional boredom affect Sophia, while her grandmother—deeply connected to nature—shows signs of memory lapses. The Summer Book is a sweet, tender tale, but its development feels sluggish and its resolution predictable. The film lacks gravity, lingering too long on minute details and subdued gestures that make it feel humble yet monotonous. Rania Hani’s somnolent score does little to invigorate the pacing, which often borders on lethargic.

There are lessons to be learned here, but it takes more than a leading star and gentle plotting to make a film truly resonate. Not to mention that the scenery has more definition than the characters. Slight at its core, The Summer Book remains stubbornly stalled between sincere intentions and a weary torpor.

Young Mothers (2025)

Direction: Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Country: Belgium / France

The Dardenne brothers, Belgian masters of social realism, return with Young Mothers, a poignant chronicle of five teenage single mothers facing economic hardship while temporarily living in a maternal center in Liège. Struggling with anxiety, hope, and fragile illusions about their new reality, these young women each grapple with uncertain futures—whether to return to their families, reconnect with their child’s father, or keep their baby. Functioning as a group portrait, this marks the Dardennes’ first ensemble film, an inspired shift that proves fruitful. They shot it in the very center that initially sparked their idea for the film, grounding the story in authentic detail.

Young Mothers is not without flaws, but it stands as a powerful, emotionally resonant portrayal of young motherhood. The Dardennes’ signature quasi-documentary style brings intimacy and immediacy to the narrative, with each story punctuated by twists and moments of quiet revelation. The suspense lies less in whether these disoriented girls will give up their babies and more in whether they’ll achieve the emotional stability needed to build a full life. It’s a sharply observed and deeply felt drama that—despite its somber themes—glows with empathy and restrained optimism.

Throughout, the need for love, care, and human connection remains constant, while trauma is often met with gentle compassion and flickers of hope. Unraveling the threads with a tone that screams truth, Young Mothers never slips into pathos. It’s a vital, humanistic work that captures the wounds of the past, contradictions of the present, and fears of the future. Not the grandest film of the year, perhaps—but quite possibly the most essential.

Tina (2025)

Direction: Miki Magasiva
Country: New Zealand

This New Zealand drama, written and directed by debut filmmaker Miki Magasiva, follows a Samoan teacher (Anapela Polataivao) who loses her daughter in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and seeks solace in directing a student choir at an elite, predominantly white private school. There, she confronts racism and social inequities but gradually earns the respect of her students, their families, and the broader community, ultimately finding redemption through music and mentorship.

Tina is a motivational, feel-good story infused with genuine emotion and strong dramatic moments. Its triumphs feel hard-won, and Magasiva—himself born in Samoa—approaches the material with sincerity and craft. He employs a largely traditional filmmaking style, balancing it with a modern sensibility. His camera searches earnestly for emotion, particularly in the climactic musical sequence, where sentimentality hovers. However, he walks that tightrope with passionate devotion, showing he has a way with both actors and sets.

Generic and uncomplicated—which doesn't mean it doesn't work—Tina catches the eye as an admirable tale of resilience and hope.

Kontinental '25 (2025)

Direction: Radu Jude
Country: Romania 

Admired Romanian writer-director Radu Jude, always incisive and corrosive in his observations, continues to nurture a deceptively simple yet striking filmmaking style, favoring long, conversational takes—this time shot entirely on an iPhone 15. His latest feature, Kontinental ’25—both a nod to Rossellini's Europe ’51 (1952) and a sharp social commentary on Romania’s systemic failures and the erosion of individual experience—captures the essence of real neighborhoods (partly drawn from documentary footage on the history of local architecture) while following the story of a guilt-ridden Hungarian bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa). After evicting a once-celebrated athlete turned destitute alcoholic—who later takes his own life—she becomes haunted by the event.

Vilified by nationalists online and demonized by the xenophobic press, Orsolya cancels her vacation with her detached husband and seeks solace through a series of tense encounters—with a cold friend, her quarrelsome nationalist mother, an Orthodox priest, and her former law student Fred (Adonis Tanta), now a food delivery worker fond of reciting “Zen” parables.

This tragicomic narrative, seemingly small in scope, expands into a broader portrait of Romania’s social, moral, and political condition. Jude fuses absurdism with realism to create something both unpretentiously profound and mordantly funny. There are no thrills in the conventional sense—the real suspense lies in discovering where Jude will ultimately take us. Visually, the film remains modest, yet the director providies just enough terra firma to sustain viewer engagement.

While Kontinental ’25 may not reach the towering resonance of Aferim! (2015) or Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), it achieves a finely tuned balance between structural modesty and thematic depth. Depending on one’s patience for slow cinema, this unabashedly sardonic work will either repel or fascinate—but it unmistakably continues Jude’s bold dismantling of Romanian society from within.

Sirat (2025)

Direction: Oliver Laxe
Country: Spain / France

The fourth feature by French-born Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe (Mimosas, 2016; Fire Will Come, 2019), Sirat unfolds as a radical road trip that transforms into a breathtaking survival thriller. Watching it feels like being struck by a seismic wave that grips you from the start. Early on, we’re told that Sirat is a bridge connecting heaven and hell—a fitting metaphor for the journey ahead. 

Co-written with his regular collaborator Santiago Fillol, the film follows a distressed father (Sergi López) and his young son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) as they search for his missing adult daughter in the southern mountains of Morocco. Along the way, they encounter a group of nomadic ravers caught in trippy dance rituals, awash in hallucinogens and the volatile promise of freedom.

Beautifully shot and powerfully acted, this intoxicating work confirms Laxe as a singular filmmaker. His skill in balancing nihilistic, hallucinatory, and spiritual tones is remarkable. Kangding Ray’s hypnotic trance score meshes seamlessly with Mauro Herce’s vivid, sun-scorched cinematography, deepening the film’s immersive atmosphere.

Aside from López, Laxe again directs non-professional actors, maintaining his idiosyncratic style—measured, raw, and far removed from conventional storytelling. Drawing inspiration from Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) and produced by Pedro Almodóvar, Sirat is a grave, unsettling meditation on loss and human frailty. It builds on fear and anguish, creating a palpable sense of doom that seeps into your bones—you’ll feel the sweat on your back in its most intense moments.

Sirat is a punchy, excruciating film that shakes things up in a way rarely seen on screen. An audacious leap forward for Laxe, who edges ever closer to becoming one of auteur cinema’s defining voices.

Manas (2025)

Direction: Marianna Brennand
Country: Brazil 

Debut filmmaker Marianna Brennand co-wrote and directed Manas, a raw, devastating, and deeply somber drama film that lays bare impaired family ties and cruel, traumatic adolescence in the isolated city of Marajó in Brazil’s Amazon region. The story sheds light on an abominable reality, examining cycles of family dysfunction that give rise to a different kind of horror.

We follow 13-year-old Marcielle (Jamilli Correa), who abruptly loses her innocence and trust after confronting sexual abuse within her own family. What’s most harrowing is the collective silence that surrounds her: relatives, church members, and the broader community are all aware of the crimes yet choose to look away.

The subject matter alone is emotionally shattering, but Brennand amplifies its impact through stark, eloquent imagery that speaks louder than words. The setting’s haunting isolation makes everything feel even more suffocating and real.

Measured in pace but unrelenting in power, this quietly distressing film is revolting, heartbreaking, and profoundly compelling. It’s not an easy watch, but Manas is an essential one—an urgent act of courage by a fearless filmmaker, carried by performances of striking emotional truth.

A Little Prayer (2025)

Direction: Angus MacLachlan
Country: USA

From Junebug (2005) writer Angus MacLachlan comes A Little Prayer, a bittersweet meditation on family, faith, and fracture. The film portrays the delicate dynamics within an American family with more seriousness than humor, revealing a humanity so genuine that its imperfections feel wholly forgivable.

The rigorously streamlined scrip follows Bill Brass (David Strathairn), a veteran and successful metal-sheet company owner who is very fond of his kindhearted daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy). He gets consumed by distress when he finds out that his alcoholic son, David (Will Pullen), is having an affair with one of his employees. His sense of stability unravels when he discovers that his troubled, alcoholic son, David (Will Pullen), is having an affair with one of his employees. At the same time, his emotionally fragile daughter, Patti (Anna Camp), returns home after another quarrel with her drug-dealer husband. Strathairn’s quiet dignity makes Bill’s private anguish palpable, while Celia Weston brings warmth and gentle humor as his wife, Venida.

A Little Prayer is a sincere, heartfelt, and beautifully restrained drama. Its format might feel familiar, but this is an affecting story that brings an emotional specificity to each scene. Balancing heartache and grace, the film captures the tragic and the beautiful facets of family life with rare empathy and control.

Suze (2025)

Direction: Dane Clark, Linsey Stewart
Country: Canada

Married couple Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart’s sophomore feature, Suze, is a smartly observed excavation of dependent single parenthood, middle-aged crisis, conflicted choices, and the unfulfilled expectations of youth.

Super-protective single mother Susan (Michaela Watkins), navigating the challenges of perimenopause, finds herself adrift when her daughter Brooke (Sara Waisglass) leaves home to attend university in Montreal. To her dismay, she unexpectedly maintains contact with Brooke’s blunt, unfiltered boyfriend, Gage (Charlie Gillespie), whom she can barely tolerate.

Flawed yet sympathetic, Suze is intimately aligned with its topics, hitting the sweet spot between awkward and affecting. Clark and Stewart’s sharp understanding of their characters’ inner lives makes the film consistently engaging, even when dealing with uncomfortable truths. Watkins delivers one of her most rounded performances, finding humor and heart in Susan’s vulnerability, while the film’s charming attention to small details makes the film easy to watch and like. 

If there’s one minor irritation, it’s how often the title name is repeated throughout — but even that can’t dull the film’s gentle wit and emotional honesty.

Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

Direction: Spike Lee
Country: USA 

Based on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), Highest 2 Lowest marks another misguided adaptation from Spike Lee, following his failed take on Oldboy (2013). It reunites him with Denzel Washington after 19 years, their last collaboration being Inside Man (2006), preceded by Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), and He Got Game (1998). 

The story centers on David King (Washington), a Bronx-born music mogul whose life spirals when his teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), is kidnapped for a ransom of $17.5 million. Screenwriter Alan Fox transplants Kurosawa’s tale into the American music industry, touching on themes of friendship, family, moral dilemma, and career. Yet the staging is so deficient and uninspired that the film never rises above mediocrity.

Undercutting the drama is a faulty score by Howard Drossin and Fergus McCreadie, which consistently fails to heighten tension, alongside an unappealing soundtrack featuring tracks by ASAP Rocky (who also stars) and Jensen McRae. The lone exception is a live performance by the late Latin-jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri, whose rendition of “Puerto Rico” stands out as a poignant posthumous tribute.

Instead of three-dimensional characters, Highest 2 Lowest gives us wax ones with zero chemistry. Nobody is really stepping outside their comfort zones. Therefore, when you should be clenching your fists with emotion, you only end up shrugging as everything seems unnaturally staged. 

Dragged out over two-plus formulaic hours, the film underscores Lee’s vertiginous decline. He has never made films in a predictable way, but here he is once again a hostage of his own misconceptions.

Familiar Touch (2025)

Direction: Sarah Friedland
Country: USA 

Familiar Touch, the first feature by 33-year-old Sarah Friedland, draws inspiration from the filmmaker's dementia-stricken grandmother. Through carefully composed frames, Friedland depicts a challenging reality with the help of 80-year-old actress Kathleen Chalfant, whose performance stands as a career highlight. Their collaboration yields a delicate, sensitive, and luminous portrait of aging.

Avoiding melodrama, the story follows Brooklyn-based octogenarian Ruth Goldman (Chalfant), who enters a nursing home after a gradual psychological decline. Filmed with precision, the slow-paced, documentary-like staging captures gestures, smiles, and silences that feel authentic, challenging clichés and striking with sobriety and purity. Though it is difficult to witness the decline of an independent woman, Familiar Touch remains warm and affirming. 

Friedland’s script doesn’t take us to a sticky-sweat swamp of tears and wild emotions, but somewhere subtler than that, without sacrificing genuine emotion. This is a small film, but one that gets to the heart with profound affection.

Late Shift (2025)

Direction: Petra Volpe
Country: Switzerland / Germany

Drawing inspiration from a detective novel by Madeline Calvelage, a young German nurse, Swiss screenwriter and director Petra Volpe delivers one of the most frighteningly believable, powerful, and necessary medical dramas in recent memory. Late Shift—a love letter to all nurses with heart—offers an enthralling experience that breathes authenticity and leaves you emotionally drained by its end.

Every frame rings true, with Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge, 2023) delivering a stirring performance as a surgical nurse working at a demanding, chronically understaffed hospital. During an unforgiving night shift, she patiently engages with patients and their families, managing the relentless stress with quiet resilience—though certain atypical situations push her perilously close to collapse.

Rich in both humanity and tension, Late Shift keeps viewers constantly on edge, propelled by a taut script, assured direction, and flawless acting. The patients’ stories, drawn from situations Volpe witnessed while preparing the film as well as some personal experiences, deepen the film’s emotional resonance while grounding its drama in reality. 

You won’t find a more stressful cinematic rollercoaster this year—and its haunting finale continues to linger long after the credits roll.

Shambhala (2024)

Direction: Min Bahadur Bham
Country: Nepal / China / other

The fourth feature by Nepalese filmmaker Min Bahadur Bham is a lovely, feminist, and evocative work set in a small Tibetan Himalayan village, where modesty becomes its greatest strength. This finely tuned drama, told with gentle intimacy, follows Pema (Thinley Lhamo), a joyful bride whose life unravels after rumors circulate that she betrayed her beloved farmer husband, Tashi (Tenzin Dalha). In their culture, polyandry is customary—by marrying Tashi, she also became the wife of his two brothers: Karma (Sonam Topden), a devoted monk, and Dawa (Karma Wangyal Gurung), still just a boy. Determined to clear her name and preserve her honor, Pema sets out across the frozen mountains to find Tashi.

Shambhala lingers at times, but its minimalist narrative is as hypnotically captivating as it is culturally significant. It unfolds as a melancholic yet entrancing Himalayan ballad about the intricacies of human relationships and the preciousness of ancient traditions. The sweeping mountain vistas and delicate musical passages imbue the film with a quiet magnetism, while Lhamo’s grounded, deeply felt performance roots it in authenticity. The result is a work that expresses gratitude for life, stirs emotion from within, and offers a final, liberating sense of release.

Sorry, Baby (2025)

Direction: Eva Victor
Country: USA

The power of American independent film is on full display in Eva Vitor’s largely autobiographical feature debut Sorry, Baby, a deft blend of black comedy and drama laced with corrosive humor and covert horror. Produced by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, 2016), the film—low-key yet strikingly authentic—conveys not only the devastating trauma and far-reaching consequences of a sexual assault endured by a literature grad student at her university, but also the tenderness and sustenance of genuine friendship. 

Victor, who also wrote and stars, is utterly convincing as the wounded Agnes; her emotions, demeanor, and concerns carry such integrity that they feel lived-in. Yet, there’s often the haunting sense that she’s teetering on the edge of a precipice. 

Tough and achingly beautiful, Sorry, Baby plays like a letter of apology to all the women forced to navigate the long road of emotional repair while their attackers walked free. At once as intimate as a sigh and as urgent as a klaxon, this symphony of shame, confusion, and resilience is driven by stellar performances—Naomi Ackie shines alongside Victor—and a compelling non-linear structure that gradually unearths and absorbs the emotional core of the story.

Suspended Time (2025)

Direction: Olivier Assayas
Country: France

Olivier Assayas is no ordinary director. Irma Vep (1996), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016) are unforgettable works that remain etched in my mind. Suspended Time, however—a personal pandemic-era product—never approaches those heights.

In this uneven docu-dramedy set during Covid, the French filmmaker revisits the confinement with his brother in their childhood home in the countryside of Essonne. Vincent Macaigne plays Paul Berger—Assayas’ on-screen “double”—an anxious, neurotic filmmaker who seeks occasional relief in therapy, while Micha Lescot—carrying a Howard Stern-like arrogance— plays his rock-critic brother Etienne. 

The brothers’ tensions are tempered by their partners, Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and Carol (Nora Hamzawi), and evenings bring a temporary peace—dinners and drinks outdoors soften the edges—only for irritations to resurface the next morning. These domestic rhythms are intercut with lyrical, autobiographical voiceovers from Assayas himself.

Covid did these things, with people suddenly needing to tell a lot about themselves. Caught in the web of the past, the film struggles to move beyond the trivial, offering little more than a handful of mildly awkward domestic moments. The “artsy” dialogues, drifting toward tedium, rob the film of momentum. Suspended Time quickly goes stale—a talkative, pretentious, and overly nostalgic trifle that leaves annoyance lingering longer than any genuine insight or emotional connection.

Great Absence (2025)

Direction: Kei Chikaura
Country: Japan 

Inspired by Japanese director Kai Chikaura’s real-life experiences, Great Absence is an affecting and thoroughly worthwhile film that tackles a deeply sensitive subject: dementia. Told through a bravely impressionistic lens, the film avoids melodrama and sentimentality, instead centering on compassion and forgiveness. The long-standing estrangement between a father and son—who haven’t seen each other in 25 years—is reframed when the father is struck by a debilitating mental illness. 

Chikaura, who shot the film entirely on 35mm, invests each move with sincerity and emotional clarity, aided by riveting performances from Tatsuya Fuji (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976; Empire of Passion, 1978) and Mirai Moriyama (The Drudgery Train, 2012). Blending documentary-like realism with meticulous craftsmanship, the director occasionally leaves some narrative details ambiguous but never lapses into heavy-handed emotion.

With its sensitive and compassionate storytelling, Great Absence gradually breaks your heart. Methodically paced and quietly powerful, it offers a moving, understated experience for viewers open to subtlety. There’s a warmth to this film—a rhythm all its own—that lingers long after the credits roll. 

The Sparrow in the Chimney (2025)

Direction: Ramon Zürcher
Country: Switzerland

In this relentlessly bleak drama written and directed by Ramon Zürcher and produced by his brother Silvan Zürcher, tensions within a dysfunctional Swiss family reach unbearable levels. Without much filter, The Sparrow in the Chimney—the final installment in their “animal” trilogy—goes everywhere except somewhere truly interesting, offering instead a strange sense of liberation that feels excruciatingly numbing. The film is so deliberate and self-absorbed, so enamored with its own bitterness, that it loses sight of emotional resonance. 

Controlling and self-destructive, Karen (Maren Eggert) harbors deep resentment toward her outgoing, if traumatized, sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein), and secretly spies on her husband. Her youngest son, Leon (Ilya Bultmann)—a domestic caretaker of sorts—is relentlessly bullied. Her eldest daughter, Johanna (Lea Zoë Voss), is openly defiant and full of disdain. To complete the dismal picture, her husband Markus (Andreas Döhler) is having an affair with their arsonist neighbor Liv (Luise Heyer), who develops a strange, unsettling bond with Karen. The narrative unfolds over two intense days.

Influenced by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and echoing the bleak universes of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, Zürcher fails to justify the film’s pervasive unpleasantness with any fresh insight. Instead, in his eagerness to provoke through both micro and macro aggressions, he more often misses than hits. There’s a lingering sense of perversion that ultimately feels exploitative rather than illuminating, as the film seems to bully its audience with its simmering anger, paranoia, and contempt. 

As sordid as it is absurdly overblown, The Sparrow in the Chimney descends into a cruel tangle of hidden desires and family secrets that collapse in a wretched avalanche of excess.