In films like Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, there's a palpable melancholy for a love that couldn't be, the feeling of being trapped in a past of possibilities where that romantic desire was very close to materializing. With Past Lives, the extraordinary debut from director Celine Song, something similar happens. This is the story of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood friends and first loves, who part ways when her family decides to leave South Korea and start a new life in America. Many years will before they reconnect through the internet, and even more time until they can see each other again. It's a bittersweet tale of lost opportunities with the age of time and the decisions we make, leading us down different paths and experiences that shape both our identity and the possibilities of love.
Awarded at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival (but infamously overlooked for the 2025 Oscars), All We Imagine As Light is the second feature film by Indian director Payal Kapadia (A Night of Knowing Nothing), an intimate and understated drama, yet human and powerful, about feeling time, our connections, love, and loneliness. The story follows two Malay women, nurses and roommates in Bombay. Prabha, the older one, is married to a man she hasn’t seen in a long time, as he lives in . She is judgmental of the younger woman, Anu, who leads a freer life and secretly romances a Muslim man, something frowned upon in their culture. It’s a film of contrasts: the ways of experiencing love through tradition and freedom, and also the alienating urban life versus a life of introspection, connection, and presence. The Light We Imagined is a discreet and intimate drama, but very human, about ordinary people, how they live love in their day-to-day lives, and even about how we experience our time and connections. One of the best films of 2024 and one of the most beautiful of the decade, something that goes beyond any awards it may or may not have received.
Challengers may be the most mature film from filmmaker Luca Guadagnino - the one considered the most American of Italian filmmakers. Despite having good films in his record, such as Call Me by Your Name and A Bigger Splash, Challengers is the one that brings certainty that Guadagnino is an auteur director, who masters the language and knows how to play with the audience's emotions. All of this, here, from a tennis match involving two former colleagues (Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist) who face off on the court, but leave behind stories from the past (told through well-inserted flashbacks) and in the relationship with the wife of one of them (Zendaya). In the end, Guadagnino, with style and good casting direction, shows that a tennis match is also about relationships - and that, ultimately, everything in the world is about sex.