The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
This is Malick's retelling of the story and mythology of Pocahontas, as well as the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. The subject matter might already be familiar to most, so it's not surprising that the main point of interest is Malick's particular style of filmmaking, which, as is very usual for him, makes or breaks the film. As a huge fan of his style, it definitely makes it for me. The sheer authenticity and uncompromising vision places this among his finest work, but the fact that he picked such an oft retold story (the more mythological melodramatic elements included) does place a slight creative restraint on him, which is why in my mind it doesn't reach the sheer brilliance of The Thin Red Line, but it is nonetheless very good. 9/10
Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
How do I even talk about this film? I always run into the same issue with Weerasethakul's films, regardless of how much I enjoy them, which is that I find his films incredibly difficult to talk about. They tap straight into primal sensation, they invite you to share the ambiguous nature of reality as it is portrayed with you, and they almost require you to view them on their own terms - as meditations, experiences that flow over you. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's absolutely mesmerizing and possibly unlike anything else in cinema.
This film is one such case. It's ostensibly about a group of soldiers who have fallen ill to a strange sickness that makes them sleep for extremely long periods of time. The film follows a middle-aged woman who befriends one of these soldiers, and what follows is a series of social encounters between the two that blur the lines between past and present, wakefulness and dreaming, reality and myth, and culture and spirituality. Weerasethakul is incredibly disciplined and eloquent in how he accomplishes this, so much so that the whole fabric of uncertainty invokes the sensation of being somewhere between awake and dreaming, just as it does with the characters in the film itself. It's not a film to be deconstructed and analysed from the outside, it's a film that invites you to live in its world and sense what the characters sense. And for that, Weerasethakul is a master of the craft. 10/10