Brady Corbet’s acting career was quietly developing with roles in the likes of Melancholia, Simon Killer, and Force Majeure, when he surprised us all with his directorial debut: this stunning and ambitious rumination on violence scored by Scott Walker. A visually arresting period fantasy!

Across 6 decades Italian maestro Marco Bellocchio has made some of the great masterworks of his homeland’s cinema—this sublime 2016 entry finds him in a tender register, examining the eternal bonds between mother and son. A perceptive look at the ties that bind and the long shadow cast by childhood.