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Jean de Florette & Manon of the Spring (1986)
Claude Berri does not set his Shakespearean tragedy of greed, scorn, and betrayal within historical halls of power, but underscores its meekness through the sun-dappled farms of 1910s France, witnessing the fateful, divine devastation wreaked upon two feuding families in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring due to a pair of blocked springs.
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Earth (1930)
The symbiosis between man, machine, and nature is a delicate dance in Earth, choreographed with seamless synchronicity through Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s lyrical montage editing, and celebrating the collectivist return of farming land back to the workers in the Soviet Union’s early days.
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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
If there was ever a supervillain to leap into the movie-musical genre, then it is surely the one whose schtick is highlighting life’s senseless absurdity through colourful, extravagant theatrics, and not even the inconsistencies that plague Todd Phillips’ direction of Joker: Folie à Deux can completely detract from such vibrantly unhinged madness.
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October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)
Rarely has history been instilled with as much lively effervescence as it is in October: Ten Days That Shook the World, as Sergei Eisenstein immortalises that jolt of radical exhilaration once felt in the Russian Revolution through the eloquent arrangement of visual symbols, using statues, weapons, and religious icons to recount this tale of Bolshevik…
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For a Few Dollars More (1965)
It is virtually impossible to separate Sergio Leone’s majestic cinematic style, mythic storytelling, and morally ambiguous characters in For a Few Dollars More, as each tightly intertwine the paths of two gunslingers competing for a bounty, yet choosing to wield their own darkness against far more rotten evils.
