2000s

The reunion of young film director Enrique with old childhood friend Angel at the start of Bad Education is complicated when fraudulent identities come to light, warping Pedro Almodóvar’s transgressive melodrama of child sexual abuse and corrupt religious authorities into a twisted yet vibrantly colourful neo-noir of elaborate lies and murder.

Within a remarkably ambitious narrative structure exploring the collision of three strangers’ lives in a devastating car crash, Alejandro Iñárritu dedicates Amores Perros to sorting through the subsequent chaos, its violent effects rippling outwards in an urban ecosystem of disloyalty, cruelty, and decay.

After two pairs of men and women suffer strikingly similar twists of fate in Talk to Her, twin storylines of comatose hospital patients and their carers intertwine, through which Pedro Almodovar’s expressive melodramatic touch offers a sensitive, complex examination of the thin line dividing love and obsession.

The obscure mystery at the heart of Zodiac is made all the more frustrating by the pinpoint precision with which David Fincher attacks his plotting, cinematography, and characterisation, shifting the focus away from its fruitless puzzles and onto a study of psychological obsession.

In his deft weaving together of disparate historical accounts and film genres, Satoshi Kon’s existential probing of questions regarding truth, fiction, celebrity, and purpose in Millennium Actress becomes a magnificently collaged narrative, reflecting the inexorable human ambition of its characters to attain that which impossibly lies beyond the reach of both reality and imagination.