Jessica Kiang

Jinsei is magnificently singular: intensely personal, wildly hypothetical and so thrillingly new it feels it might itself have come from some version of the vividly strange future it imagines.

Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.

Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic.

“Samurai” is classical, if pared-back, in approach — at once a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice.

The Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all — and totally alone.

Though it can be genuinely wearying and not a little depressing to spend 148 minutes in the company of a man so deeply wrongheaded and in such maddening self-denial (even Paulette, complicit in her own way in her husband’s ambition will eventually insist that he stops calling her his little lady) it is certainly instructive and horribly relevant.

With all due apologies to any real-world sufferers of supernatural body-switching, who perhaps regard the film’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the condition’s flippantly comedic treatment in pop culture more generally, the real unknown of The Unknown is the reason behind making a body-swap movie feel so wholly disembodied.

It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional, careful, considered filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic set-up. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last.

The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature, is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be.

Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.