Team FC
Decision to Leave (Mubi)
A married detective and a murder suspect begin a torrid affair. This one-liner is a quintessential Park Chan-wook one liner – ripe with the promise of aesthetically-charged sex, twisted violence and stylised gore.
The Wonder (Netflix)
Sebastian Lelio’s masterfully muted adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel is a meditation on storytelling, spirituality and the humanity that binds them.
Barbarian (Disney+ Hotstar)
An ingenious Airbnb advert and an unpredictable psychodrama at once, Barbarian is the sort of whimsical horror movie that melts the barrier between visceral entertainment and intellectual engagement.
Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood (Netflix)
Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) ran so that Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood could serenely walk into the sunset. Through the lens of adult remembrance and childhood memory, Richard Linklater lands this quietly nostalgic personal-essay-meets-cultural-snapshot shuttle on a featherbed of rotoscope animation.
Crimes of the Future (Mubi)
David Cronenberg views the human body not for what it is, but what it can be. And, in some strange prophetic way, what it will be.
Athena (Netflix)
Director Romain Gavras has described his action thriller as a “myth of the near future”. The film is set in Athena, a fictional Paris suburb that becomes a war zone when a video showing the murder of a 13-year-old boy by a group of unidentified men in police uniforms, goes viral.
Cha Cha Real Smooth (Apple TV+)
Andrew (Cooper Raiff) is your typical Gen Z gent — he’s sensitive, articulate, witty, aimless, a little bit angsty and largely unemployed.
The Stranger (Netflix)
Moody, dark and shadowed with mystery, Thomas Wright’s procedural is about an undercover cop who is trying to get a murder suspect to cough up incriminating evidence.
The Banshees of Inisherin (Disney+ Hotstar)
Life in Inisherin is simple. There’s a pub where people gather and sing; a store owner who is hungry for news; a village idiot who is also a truth teller; a crone who watches over it all; and locals like Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farell) who have settled into idyllic, daily routines.
Nope (Prime Video)
What do you do if the horse ranch you own is being stalked by a hungry alien? If you’re characters in a Jordan Peele film, as brother and sister OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) are, then you embark on an adventure that obliquely examines everything from the erasure of Black history, the imagery of Biblical plagues, the lure of the spectacular as well as the history of photography and the moving image.