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Nyad (2023)
With Nyad’s basis in the true story of one 64-year-old woman’s marathon swimming achievement, this underdog tale is a natural leap into narrative filmmaking for documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, proving that destiny is little more than a matter of persistence and patience for those pushing their bodies to exhausting physical limits.
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Rumble Fish (1983)
Whatever optical restrictions are imposed by the legendary Motorcycle Boy’s colour blindness In Rumble Fish are drastically offset by the dreamy expressionism elongating every angle of Francis Ford Coppola’s visuals, offering a refreshingly eccentric perspective of 1960s gang warfare, urban Oklahoma, and its restless adolescents seeking to break free of their social confines.
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Ferrari (2023)
For all Ferrari’s narrative unevenness, the god of car racing and conquest at the centre of Michael Mann’s modern mythologising makes for a compellingly thorny subject, leaving behind a trail of bodies in his blood-stained ascent to cultural immortality, while hiding his pride, shame, and sorrow behind tinted sunglasses.
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Dream Scenario (2023)
The nature of celebrity is a fickle thing for the insecure, unremarkable Paul Matthews in Dream Scenario, as unpredictable as those strangers’ dreams across the world that star him as the main character, forming a darkly comic allegory for fame’s nightmarishly dangerous sting.
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Poor Things (2023)
Born into the body of her deceased mother and setting off on a coming-of-age odyssey across the ocean, Bella Baxter’s existence is a wondrous paradox of surreal impossibilities in Poor Things, forming the centrepiece of Yorgos Lanthimos’ eccentric black comedy that draws an immense appreciation of life from its wickedly offbeat satire.
