Helena Wittmann’s cinema is attuned above all to the odd interplays between individuals and nature. Swapping out the crisp digital of her sensational 2017 debut Drift for hazy 16mm, Human Flowers of Flesh operates according to its own deliberate rhythms, charting its heroine’s journey in the Mediterranean before reaching an enigmatic conclusion deliberately invoking Claire Denis’s seminal Beau Travail. Notably comprised of an international ensemble cast led by Greek actress Angeliki Papoulia, the quietly grand scope of the film suggests an ever-expanding view of the world as prescribed by the sea, never resting and always mystifying in the particular manner that Wittmann excels at.

Trenque Lauquen continues and, in many ways, elaborates on the ascendancy of the Argentine production company El Pampero Cine as one of the greatest forces in cinema today. Directed by Laura Citarella, who produced Mariano Llinás’s modern landmark La flor, it functions as a loose sequel to her 2011 film Ostende, with the principal linkage courtesy of its heroine Laura (Laura Paredes, one of the leads of Llinás’s film, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a botanist who disappears at the beginning of the film, leaving her boyfriend and her coworker to fruitlessly search for her, developing their own uneasy relationship along the way. What ensues is a four-hour, eight-chapter opus that constantly hops between the trio’s perspectives, and in the process serves as almost something of a response film to its spiritual predecessor: while La flor‘s quartet of female leads existed as pure fantasy, icons who came to embody entire axioms of cinema, Trenque Lauquen‘s approach is more grounded, yet in some ways even more elusive. Its shapeshifting journey — spanning epistolary detective-work, eerie quasi-science fiction, landscape observation, and so much more — is far less delineated, and thus the genres become a backdrop to this portrait of a woman and the small city she roams. Patient but always surprising, blending El Pampero Cine’s simple point-and-shoot style with overt cinematic devices (above all voiceover), the ultimate elegance of the film is overwhelming.

The pre-title sequence of Alain Gomis’s revelatory archival documentary Rewind & Play is, fittingly, a series of shots that will be recapitulated later in the slender 65-minute running time: Thelonious Monk sweating under the hot lights of a television studio in 1969 while his interviewer blathers on. The film is formed entirely from the footage shot for a shelved French TV documentary about the legendary jazz pianist and operates in three semi-discrete parts: Monk’s arrival, as he ambles around the streets of Paris; a contentious interview, where his brusque responses are brushed aside or ordered to be reshot; and a series of performances, whose brilliance is contextualized and offset by the preceding uneasiness. While Gomis doesn’t opt to directly mimic the inimitable, loping hammering of Monk’s music in formal terms, the inclusion of analog video artifacts and microphone bumps, along with some very canny layering of video and stripping-down of audio, pushes the viewer into something of the discomfort the notoriously private icon must have been feeling. The unusual decision to place the explanatory title card right before the end credits only cements the totally successful experiment at play here: only by looking back and considering, rather than trying and failing to impose a narrative, can one truly begin to grasp the essence of genius.

Much of the discussion around Albert Serra’s monumental new film has centered around its incongruity: an uncommonly “accessible” film for the notoriously abstruse filmmaker of grotesque and minimal narratives, one embraced by even many of his usual detractors. Indeed, its late-breaking addition to an otherwise fairly anemic Cannes competition line-up felt entirely fitting, a bomb (nuclear or not) thrown into the traditional order. But what makes Pacifiction such an enrapturing experience is the mysterious ways it emerges as both hypnotic — maintaining the same mood and undercurrents of paranoia surrounding the possible resumption of French nuclear testing in Tahiti — and disruptive, marked by indelible scenes of sudden impressionism: a boat and jet-ski ride on enormous crashing waves, a visit to a decaying house at sunset, a nightclub that becomes almost monochrome in its deep hues. It wouldn’t be too much to say that there has never been a film that looks like this, somehow shot with Blackmagic Pocket cameras that yield a kind of lush, alien glow, where even the many lackadaisical scenes of petty interactions thrum with an unidentifiable anxiety. And at the center is Benoît Magimel, a performance as galvanizing an anchor as Léaud in The Death of Louis XIV, where the soft sleaze of his voice and his imposing white suit-clad presence lend the exact kind of empty swagger that guides the film along. In its invocation of colonialism’s past and present by way of nothing except suggestion and sheer style, it is nigh impossible to imagine a more fully assured, a more tantalizing film this year.

Decision to Leave finds Park Chan-wook burrowing into, if not entirely new territory for South Korea’s preeminent crime filmmaker, then the foundations of his strongest aspects. The bifurcated telling of a detective’s (Park Hae-il) continuously shifting relationship with the wife (Tang Wei) of his latest investigation’s decedent, it operates almost polyrhythmically, letting the dead ends and often humorous tangents inherent to a bewildering murder case play out while remaining intently precise in its dealings with the beats from shot to shot. The visual schema constantly dazzles, employing bold diagonals, distorted and unexpected POVs, and superimpositions of digital information that playfully carries the film along its deliberately mirroring halves. But the true heart of the film rests in its potent riff on Vertigo, where identity is shaped along more ambiguous lines, and, above all, Tang’s performance, surely among the greatest by an actor not primarily speaking in their native language. Her capacity for simultaneous seeming total transparency and opacity molds the emotional tenors of the film, rendering it a tentative romance where the words — spoken in Korean or Mandarin — take on so many other unintended resonances. The entirely appropriate ending rings with such force because of the care and confidence placed in the proceedings, an exquisitely enigmatic dance which must end in the only way possible.

Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to his Palme d’Or winning The Square epitomizes a certain contradiction: he is a director who I wish I didn’t like as much as I do. In its tripartite narrative, which follows the disintegration of a relationship over the course of increasingly absurd circumstances, Triangle of Sadness does, all things considered, have little else on its mind aside from the skewering of the nouveau riche as their environments get turned upside down by machinery, unwelcome workers, and eventually the natural world itself. But while Östlund’s aims are fairly pat, aside from a late-breaking development which productively deepens the complexities of otherwise steadily declining relationships, his skill lies in the actual orchestration of his scenes, and in the touches of comedy that arise from carefully placed running gags. As might be expected from such a scattershot approach, the good and the bad (and the ugly) intermix freely throughout, often in the same scene. Östlund’s spare aesthetic, mostly conveyed in long shot, and his facility with actors as anchoring presences — in The Square Claes Bang; here, Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean, with Dolly de Leon coming to the fore in the last, crucially distended third — helps unite many of these sequences. And on some level, I find such devices as a woman who can only speak one German phrase, the elevation of aerosolized water to a necessary part of survival, and the sight of Woody Harrelson (as the Communist captain of the yacht which serves as the setting of the second act) and a Russian manure baron totally soused, reading Marx quotes back at each other over the intercom as the boat is battered by ocean waves irresistibly funny; your mileage will certainly vary.

George Miller’s return to feature filmmaking after his career’s apotheosis Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) trades that film’s tactility and near-relentless narrative drive for something much more fantastical and circular, with largely mixed results. While Three Thousand Years of Longing takes as its jumping-off point the extended encounter between a narratologist (Tilda Swinton) and the djinn she unwittingly unleashes (Idris Elba), the film moves with uncertainty between their present-day hotel room and the simulacra of ancient times that the genie has experienced. Each of the three stories he tells revolves around the circumstances in which he was imprisoned, feeling free to meander through the massive, beautiful, and uncanny digital structures and the somewhat weaker stories, which vary between the joy of learning and the delight in grotesquerie. It truly is unfortunate that Miller’s worthy but limited effort — by his gleefully maximalist sensibilities that overwhelm the delicate tête-à-tête; by first too little, then too much footage of the present day; by a romance that, while affecting generally and carried out well by the two actors, feels schematic — came out just a year after Memoria. The fear and trembling in the face of the supernatural/extraterrestrial that Swinton conveyed so potently there reappears here in attenuated form; there is even a scene where the djinn acts as a radio receiver for all the noises of the modern world. Three Thousand Years of Longing and Miller himself are best in the moment, in little tricks and teleological progressions, which only inconsistently come to the surface here.

Something of a culmination of the love-story-as-narrative-arc that Hong Sang-soo has crafted with Kim Min-hee, The Novelist’s Film finds the two paired with Lee Hye-young, the latest major addition to his repertory ensemble. Unfolding mostly over the course of a day, the film tracks the novelist Jun-hee (Lee) as she pays a visit to the small town where her former friend resides. As she accumulates chance encounters with both familiar faces — a poet, a director — and new ones — recently reclusive actress Gil-soo, played by Kim — an idea for a short film comes to mind out of the small interactions she shares as both participant and observer. The film’s dynamic, and indeed that of Hong’s Kim films in general, is perfectly captured in Gil-soo’s introduction, walking briskly around a park in a leather jacket as Jun-hee happens to see her from afar: the character, the director, and the viewer are fortunate to find this remarkable woman at this time of life. She is nothing less than a burst of inspiration, an enrapturing person who in turn comes to absorb all of the incredible coincidences and hurtful memories that forms everyday life. With the coda, one of the most mysterious and moving scenes in Hong’s entire career, The Novelist’s Film enchanting and lovingly earnestness comes to full bloom.