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Nimona (2023)
By subverting the archaic legends that pass down prejudices from one generation to the next, Nimona recognises the freedom that lies in open-minded acceptance, uniting a fugitive knight and a chaotic shapeshifter against a conspiracy that threatens to destabilise their futuristic, medieval kingdom.
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Beauty and the Beast (1946)
It is not just the fantastical designs and living furniture which imbue the enchanted castle of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast with an air of otherworldly awe, but its illusory logic makes for a dreamscape as inventively surreal as it is fearsome, penetrating deceptive facades of beauty and ugliness that conceal the true nature…
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Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Lee Cronin brings a refreshing creativity to Sam Raimi’s demonic horror in Evil Dead Rise, as he allegorically twists the image of a loving family into that of dysfunctional household, and lays into the terror of seeing one’s mother transform into a hideous, abusive creature.
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American Fiction (2023)
It is a cruel twist of irony that sees writer Monk Ellison’s parody of exploitative Black novels exalted as a serious piece of literature in American Fiction, and one which Cord Jefferson wields impressive self-awareness over, sharply satirising the liberal elite’s attempts to assuage their white guilt by gleefully consuming African American trauma in media.
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Dune: Part Two (2024)
Denis Villeneuve’s extraordinary adaptation of Frank Herbert’s unfathomably vast imagination incidentally demonstrates his own in Dune: Part Two, further developing his elemental worldbuilding and biblical iconography through the darkly subverted monomyth of a prophesied Messiah, and pushing the parable’s cinematic spectacle to astonishingly creative lengths.
