AT the age of 74, and after more than 20 films, celebrated Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has won the Golden Lion with his latest feature, The Room Next Door (★★★★★); another entry into the director’s increasingly melancholic oeuvre, prone to analysing the fear of death and physical decline.

Shot in English, and starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, the film explores the reunion of two friends, Martha and Ingrid, one a novelist, the other a war reporter. Martha, afflicted with an incurable cancer, invites Ingrid to a lavish modernist house in Woodstock, where she wants to choose the exact hour of her death with an illegal euthanasia pill. 

There are several sequences of amazing emotional power, such as the moment Tilda’s character reveals how little time she has left. Everything is right: the miraculous use of words, the limpid cinematography, the natural acting, creating an atmosphere you can’t forget. Almodovar’s style is now more minimalist and more introspective. This is one of Almodovar’s simplest films, and one of his most universal.

Another one of the top awards, the Silver Lion for best director, went to Brady Corbet for The Brutalist (★★★★★). The Brutalist chronicles the journey of Hungarian Jewish architect, Laszlo Toth, beginning with his arrival in the US in 1947. Initially forced to work in poverty, he soon wins a contract that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life. 

Corbet shoots in 70mm to give the film the feel of a movie made in the ’50s. Set in Philadelphia, it recreates the massive Jewish migration from Europe in the period, and the exploitation of a society that was running at capitalism full-tilt, with the vulgarity of the burgeoning moneyed-classes. Laszlo Toth may be a fictional character, but so well written that his life story seems authentic. Corbet develops the narrative structure, and dialogue, that keeps that keeps in time with the period, including a detailed depiction of the working-class conditions: Eastern, southern Europe, and African-American working alongside each other in huge construction sites. The Brutalist is more than three hours long and presented with an intermission, but time flies as you watch an extraordinary life, full of unpredictable turns. Ambitious, impressive and emotional; it is a masterpiece. 

Wang Bing’s impressive new documentary, Youth Homecoming (★★★★★), is the third and final instalment of a trilogy the director has dedicated to the Chinese’s working class. The two- and half-hour-long documentary follows young textile workers from the start of the season. They live in poor conditions, sharing small rooms, while the work dries up and many don’t get paid at all. The focus then moves to China’s rural region where time seems to have stopped. This is a genuinely sorrowful film, poetic and poignant, about how widely the exploitation of industry has spread. 

Missing from the prize list was Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (★★★★★), an adaptation of William Burroughs’s autobiographical novel, starring Daniel Craig. Lee, an American expat living in Mexico City, spends his days drinking, doing drugs and picking up guys. He becomes obsessed with a handsome young American who seems to be straight. Nevertheless, they venture south together in search of a drug Lee wants to sample. Erotic, romantic, funny, and deep, Queer is a tour de force, a Conrad’s trip. Perhaps to compensate for a plot of crime and sex, Guadagnino creates a memorable mise en scene, expressing his idiosyncratic style, making films no-one else could, or would, for that matter. Its visual design and characterisations work in concert to achieve an intense atmosphere. 

From the farther realms of art-cinema exploration came Pedro Costa’s Apocalypse In The Tropics (★★★★★), a film of inspired brilliance that investigates the increasingly powerful influence faith leaders hold over politics in Brazil. The question here is not the power of democracy but of theocracy. The film reveals how deeply implicated the evangelical movement has been in Brazil’s recent political turmoil and grapples with its apocalyptic theology. As in his previous The Edge of Democracy, Costa documents a time of profound confusion and despair with a clear and lyrical eye.

Another interesting documentary was Goran Hugo Olsson’s Israel Palestine On Swedish TV 1958-1989 (★★★★★). It contains a unique, visually conspicuous footage from the Swedish Television archives, showing both sides of the conflict. The film demonstrates how one country’s media perceived one of the world’s longest conflict. Beautiful images with interesting characters mixed with human testimonies and geopolitical events. An example of excellent public TV service. 

Asif Kapadia’s sci-fi horror 2073 (★★★★★) tackles the biggest challenges endangering our present, a warning of the world we will bring about if we don’t act now. We follow a woman struggling to hold on to a shred of freedom in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. We don’t learn much about her, other than her effort to stay off grid and out of sight of drones. In voiceover, she recalls talk of an earlier time when humanity had a chance to avoid catastrophe but blew it. A genre-busting mix of archive footage and drama, 2073 witnesses the terrifying threats facing us: democratic recession, the rise of neofascism, the climate disaster, and the intrusion of surveillance technology.