-
The Girl with the Needle (2024)
The face of human evil is insidiously disguised in The Girl with the Needle, though Magnus van Horn’s monochrome cinematography offers a disturbing glimpse behind its warm, maternal mask, adapting a chilling piece of Danish history which once shook the post-war nation to its core.
-
The Last Laugh (1924)
It is a cruel reversal of fortune which sees a proud hotel doorman demoted to washroom attendant in The Last Laugh, and F.W. Murnau’s liberated camerawork evocatively traces his tragic descent into deep humiliation, dwelling in the shame and indignity that comes with an earth-shattering challenge to one’s entire identity.
-
Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
No single image in Songs from the Second Floor reveals the full scope of eternal traffic jams, nonsense bureaucracy, and apocalyptic senselessness that this city has descended into, but as Roy Andersson’s painterly tableaux come together with deadpan melancholy, so too does his landscape of surreal, urban decay take absurdist form.
-
Juror #2 (2024)
When a man serving on a jury recognises his own unexpected culpability in Juror #2, moral turmoil begins to stir his conscience, offering a rich subject for Clint Eastwood’s study of stifled, agonising guilt.
-
Sinners (2025)
Music is a supernatural force that can pierce the veil between life and death in Sinners, and it is through its bluesy harmonies that Ryan Coogler resonates a timeless riff between warring cultural ideals, setting one 1930s African American juke joint against an insidious band of vampires.
