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The Batman (2022)
It is in the dingy, yellow lighting and deliberately hazy camera focus of The Batman that Matt Reeves crafts an entirely new vision of Gotham City and its morally ambiguous vigilante, thoughtfully examining notions of vengeance as a corrupting force within the tight grip of its magnificently thrilling narrative.
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A Woman is a Woman (1961)
There is a biting dissonance at play in A Woman is a Woman, giving the impression that its characters are always on the verge of breaking out into song without ever reaching that climactic emotional outpouring, thereby turning Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern movie-musical pastiche into a playfully formal experiment of non-sequiturs and fourth wall breaks.
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Pig (2021)
Ex-chef Rob’s ability to evoke emotions so powerful that he can move hearts with a single dish may seem like the basis of a ludicrously sentimental character, but the patient honesty of both Nicolas Cage and director Michael Sarnoski sells every tender minute of his quest to recover his stolen truffle-hunting pig.
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The Godfather (1972)
In transposing classical storytelling traditions onto a 1940s New York crime family in The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola effectively crafts an epic piece of American mythology for the twentieth century, unravelling one of the greatest pure narratives put to film with monumental ambition in its sheer economy and compellingly tragic characters.
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The Worst Person in the World (2021)
There is something playfully novelistic about the way Joachim Trier lays The Worst Person in the World out in a series of chapters around our young protagonist, Julie, guiding us through her messy mistakes and complicated relationships with a superbly formal structure, and thoughtfully constructing what might as well be a coming-of-age film for those…
