TRAIN DREAMS by Clint Bentley
Quiet, understated, yet so very meaningful. You came here for Joel Edgerton, obviously, but stayed for getting your soul crushed and comforted in equal measures. Hey, you’d better hold on to something, right?!

 

BRING HER BACK by Danny & Michael Philippou
The brother’s follow-up to “Talk To Me“ is a surprisingly mean and overall nasty genre bastard that will give people a run for their money that mainly connected the always great Sally Hawkins with the Paddington franchise.

 

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU by Mary Bronstein
Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The film plays its card like a cruel cosmic joke that’s been thrown at Rose Byrne’s main character, who has to find out the hard way that it’s actually impossible to put your very own oxygen mask on first when you’re a walking, talking emergency.

 

DIE MY LOVE by Lynne Ramsay
Regardless if you wanna see the film as a statement on postpartum depression, on relationships and their consequential psychoses, or simply on the often horrifying imbalance between expectations and reality, it is up to you. Fact is that it’s one of this year’s most unnerving and wildest rides.

 

THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR by Geeta Gandbhir
This filmic discourse on the horrors of American “stand-your-ground“ laws is a documentary in its purest form, since it’s basically using footage shot by police body cams and CCTV only. It’s as if you’re watching something that was never meant for you to witness.

 

WEAPONS by Zach Cregger
Cregger’s follow-up to the overrated “Barbarian“ is a one-of-a-kind horror freak-out that basically feels like an upgraded Brothers Grimm tale, which isn’t shying away from throwing quite a few social issues and laughs into its eerie cocktail.

 

THE PLAGUE by Charlie Polinger
Possibly this year’s most honest (and therefore bleak) coming-of-ager. Luckily, Pollinger isn’t even remotely interested in offering any kind of solution approach to all the horrors puberty - and its implied first serious taste of juvenile cruelty and power struggles - is showcasing on a daily basis.

 

ONE BATTLE AFTER THE OTHER by Paul Thomas Anderson
It certainly isn’t the best film of the last twenty years, as some might have claimed, but, wow, what a bold and gloriously weird one this is: a paranoid thriller, a satire on America’s war with itself, a tender father-daughter drama, a black comedy on radicalization - the list is basically endless.

 

SIRAT by Oliver Laxe
It’s the end of the world as we know it - on screen and beyond - and this existential, beat-driven road movie works as its quintessential standard reference. It’s as if Camus would’ve imagined “Mad Max: Fury Road“: a hypnotic, relentless, and overall intense experience.

 

BIRDEATER by Jack Clark & Jim Weir
It’s not a horror flick in the classic sense, but proof that an unpredictably eerie depiction of the dynamics within relationships and friendships - especially when under the influence of booze and drugs - can be equally as terrifying as the thing that hides under your bed.