Lee Marshall joined Screen in 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications.
Read our other critics’ top tens here.
Top 10
1. The Zone Of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
There is a physiological phenomenon known as the ‘negative picture illusion’, whereby staring at a picture for a length of time burns a kind of reversal print on the retina. Glazer’s free adaptation of Martin Amis’s Auschwitz-set novel is a dramatic negative picture illusion of the Holocaust, perhaps the first work of art to take an utterly clear-eyed view of how humans could do that to other humans.
2. Poor Things
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
This is a film that reminds you what big, inventive, provocative filmmaking looks like. Willem Dafoe is a benevolent but utterly mad Victorian Frankenstein whose experiments with putting baby brains in women’s bodies lead directly to one of this year’s bravura performances, as Emma Stone conveys what it must be like to live in that disjunct. It’s also very funny — will any lisping lovelorn cad ever out-cad Mark Ruffalo’s?
3. Past Lives
Dir. Celine Song
What might be seen as a ‘should I hook up with my childhood sweetheart?’ romcom is so much more: Korean-Canadian writer/director Song’s debut is about a grand passion that becomes a sounding-board for the traumas of cultural, geographical and linguistic displacement.
4. The Taste Of Things
Dir. Tran Anh Hung
This lyrical, tactile olfactory romance is an ode to the pleasures of the senses but also to the fleeting sense of happiness, loved bodies — and fresh peas. Juliette Binoche is devastating as the quiet, independently minded sous chef to Benoît Magimel’s refined yet also emotionally grounded epicure. The seasons turn, casseroles simmer, an old life ebbs and a new one unfolds.
5. Evil Does Not Exist
Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi
What a consummate filmmaker Hamaguchi has become. In no more than 20 long-drawn-out scenes, he first sets up what feels like a serious eco-drama about incomers who risk ruining the rural community whose forest ways they intend to market to stressed city folk. Then it takes us somewhere altogether more mysterious. It is a film that lingers and grows.
6. Killers Of The Flower Moon
Dir. Martin Scorsese
7. La Chimera
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher
8. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Dir. Anna Hints
9. Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros
Dir. Frederick Wiseman
10. House Of The Seasons
Dir. Oh Jung-min
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