Topping Cahiers du cinéma’s list of best films from 2022, Albert Serra’s mesmerizing epic conjures up the malaise and paranoia poisoning the Edenic calm of sun-soaked Tahiti. Steeped in moral ambiguity, Benoît Magimel’s stunning performance embodies the corruptive power of the imperial state.

Accommodating both the downbeat and the surreal, Martín Rejtman’s first feature in nine years treats midlife depression with a holistic sense of humor. Comic scenarios flow into one another with the flexibility of a master yogi, and achieve a strengthened core in The Delinquents’ Esteban Bigliardi.

In all playful seriousness, the master of slow cinema Albert Serra surprised audiences with this homage to the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud. Seen as an allegory for the mythical actor’s own slow decline, this grandiose piece provides some of the most beautiful Versailles imagery ever seen on screen.

Eschewing explanation for rhythmic abstraction, this authentically mysterious documentary poses profound riddles about beauty, violence, and mortality. In the death-baiting, cherubically handsome bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, acclaimed director Albert Serra finds a welter of enigmatic contradictions.

A chimeric wonder from director Lisandro Alonso, Eureka slips the boundaries of space and time. Beginning as a Viggo Mortensen-led western before morphing into something else entirely, this metaphysical meditation on the exploitation of Indigenous histories is mesmerising, transcendental cinema.