-
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
The anonymous affair which widower Paul and young actress Jeanne conduct makes for a warped power dynamic in Last Tango in Paris, and Bernardo Bertolucci is unafraid to plunge the crude depths of their precarious arrangement, prodding at raw, psychological wounds that explode with love, grief, and violent anger.
-
The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
Mikhail Kalatozov’s dynamic camerawork does not spare us from the anguish of a nation subjected to unfathomable trauma in The Cranes Are Flying, distilled within one young woman who achingly perseveres through the grief, guilt, and loneliness of seeing loved ones fall to the carnage of war.
-
Wicked (2024)
The splendid combination of musical and cinematic talents behind Wicked effectively claims its iconic cultural status within cinema as well as theatre, expanding this whimsical fable of friendship and prejudice to elaborate, epic proportions fitting of its grand narrative stakes.
-
Sergei Eisenstein: Symphonies of Soviet Cinema
Cinema becomes a symphony of notes, rhythms, and textures within the hands of Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisenstein, developing the language of film editing through his five methods of montage, and reaching a peak of visual, kinetic innovation that has never been surpassed.
-
The Passenger (1975)
Stealing a dead man’s identity seems like the perfect opportunity for television journalist David Locke to escape his unfulfilling life in The Passenger, though as Michelangelo Antonioni drifts him through a perplexing labyrinth of his own making, we are implicated in his confrontation with life’s empty, senseless banality.
