Sick of franchise movies and IP-driven releases from Hollywood? Cast your cinematic net wide and check out the best of world cinema, here on KrisWorld.

The Teachers’ Lounge

This classroom drama plunges audiences into an ethical dilemma, as what seems to be a small matter snowballs and engulfs the whole school.

Seventh-grade maths and physical education teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a newcomer at a German middle school. She is pulled into an investigation after money gets stolen from the teachers’ lounge.

Two class representatives accuse their Turkish classmate Ali (Can Rodenbostel) of theft. Ali is found to be carrying a large sum of money, but his parents, Mr (Özgür Karadeniz) and Mrs Yilmaz (Uygar Tamer), provide a plausible explanation, accusing the school of discrimination.

Carla decides to find the real culprit, suspecting school administrator Mrs Kuhn (Eva Löbau). It turns out that Mrs Kuhn’s son is Oskar (Leo Stettnisch), a good but reserved student whom Carla has tried to reach out to. When Oskar’s classmates ostracise him because of his mother’s apparent crime, he plots his revenge against Carla.

Directed by İlker Çatak, who co-wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker, The Teachers’ Lounge earned critical acclaim and was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. It features naturalistic performances, especially from Benesch and Stettnisch, and displays an astute understanding of the sometimes-fraught dynamics between students and teachers in school, contextualising it with societal tensions. A story with no easy answers, The Teachers’ Lounge is as tense and absorbing as it is thought-provoking.

The Teachers' Lounge

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The Teachers' Lounge

Carla Nowak, a teacher, starts her first job at a middle school. She stands out among the new staff. When a series of thefts occur at the school, one of her students is suspected.

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Perfect Days

The medley of emotions that flashes across Hirayama’s (Kōji Yakusho) face as Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” plays at the closing of the film is a visual testament to the thespian’s acting prowess. It’s no surprise then that he won the Best Actor Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for the role, while the film won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. At first knowledge of the film’s plot, one would be surprised that a tale about the daily routine of a public toilet cleaner (with amazing taste in music) in Tokyo, Japan, could have garnered such an enthusiastic response. But dive in, and you’ll see and understand Perfect Days’ soothing, meditative quality.

Hirayama’s zen-like approach to life — his focus on the present moment — is only disrupted through interactions with other characters who almost threaten the quiet peace he has cultivated. Despite these disruptions, he finds a way back to his baseline and discovers the pockets of beauty in the mundane. Director Wim Wenders confesses in an interview: “I wrote [Hirayama’s] story, but I didn’t want to say it. I wanted the audience to fill in the story [for themselves].” Filmed in a documentary-like manner, and with sparse dialogue, the audience is drawn into Hirayama’s life, with the freedom to interpret why he is the way he is and what his backstory is. But the clues, and the few spoken lines in the film, steer the audience back to the film’s point: life happens in the present. As Hirayama says in an almost chant-like manner: “Next time is next time! Now is now!”

The Taste of Things

This sensuous ode to gastronomy will get foodies feeling peckish. Sumptuous in its cinematography, The Taste of Things opens with 35 minutes of footage purely focused on the act of making food, sans dialogue. And when the dialogue begins to filter through, it is peppered with interesting facts about various figures and luminaries in French culinary history, including a fascinating bit about the creation of the Baked Alaska dessert.

Director Tran Anh Hung’s masterful craftsmanship isn’t just reserved for food shots; he also sensitively handles the movie’s other big theme, that of an enduring love between a couple in “the autumn of [their] lives”, as Benoît Magimel’s character Dodin Bouffant puts it. Tran, who won the Best Director award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for this movie, tells The Guardian: “I wanted to make a movie about art, and I chose food because this art is very concrete. For me, cinema is something that needs to be very sensual, very physical.”

His camera artfully captures the tenderness and mutual respect between the two leads (Dodin, a gourmand, and Juliette Binoche’s Eugénie, a talented cook) for each other’s mastery of the craft. It is a romance between two equals who are united by their love for food. Most poignant is the scene where Eugénie asks whether she is Dodin’s cook or his wife. His answer and her response to it beautifully encapsulate the essence of an abiding relationship.

Weekend Rebels

From Marc Rothemund, director of the Academy Award-nominated movie Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, comes the story of the lengths a father will go, quite literally, to connect with his neurodivergent child. As the family breadwinner, Mirco (Florian David Fitz) has little time for his 10-year-old autistic son Jason (Cecilio Andresen), who is prone to sensory-overload meltdowns. After Jason expresses his desire to find a favourite German football club, Mirco makes a pact with him: They will watch games on weekends, and, in return, the boy must not let himself be provoked at school any more. But Mirco gets more than he bargained for when Jason declares they must see all 56 teams live in their respective stadiums before he makes up his mind. As father and son travel to the country’s stadiums and navigate security pat-downs, rowdy fans, and ‘embarrassing’ mascots, the pair gradually learn about each other and the beautiful chaos of groundhopping.

Evil Does Not Exist

In the rural Japanese village of Mizubiki, widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) ekes out a living as a woodcutter with his young daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa). Their peaceful existence is shattered with the announcement by a sinister property developer of its intention to build a glamping site in the area. At a town hall meeting, the locals express their concern about the project’s environmental impact to the company’s representatives, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani). When Hana goes missing, Takahashi joins Takumi and the villagers to find her. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who won an Oscar for Drive My Car, helms this slow-boiling, meditative eco-drama, which culminates in a shockingly violent yet thought-provoking ending.

The Zone of Interest

This historical movie is a striking portrait of the banality of evil. Adapted from Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest is set in 1943 and follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), a Nazi SS commandant overseeing the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. He lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children in an idyllic house next to the camp, trying to shield their children from the horrifying acts that Rudolf is perpetrating. While Amis’ novel features fictional characters inspired by the Hösses, writer-director Jonathan Glazer opted to make the movie about the Hösses themselves, researching them for two years. At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, the movie won the Grand Prix (the second-highest honour behind the Palme d’Or), the Cannes Soundtrack Award, and the International Federation of Film Critics Prize. It also went on to win the Best International Feature and Best Sound awards at the 2024 Oscars.