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Lady Vengeance (2005)
The loss of innocence is no small tragedy in Lady Vengeance, and yet there is an elegant restraint to one ex-convict’s retribution against the serial killer who groomed and framed her, further drawn through Park Chan-wook’s stylish aesthetic as he considers the destructive co-dependency of purity and corruption.
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Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Within the tight doorframes and behind the railings that Rainer Werner Fassbinder hems his characters into, the interracial romance of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is confined to a liminal space between domestic and public life that refuses to separate one from the other, merging melodrama and realism to craft an ineffable moral fable of…
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Pandora’s Box (1929)
In the delicate hands of G.W. Pabst, this fable of female scapegoating develops beguiling nuances in its thoughtful characterisations, unequivocally rejecting clear-cut labels of vamps and virgins baked into the history of mythological storytelling, yet never failing to draw us deeper into Louise Brooks’ dazzling feminine thrall.
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Pi (1998)
True order is found not by trying to penetrate a complex universe in Pi, but rather by accepting its dazzling, wondrous incomprehensibility, as Darren Aronofsky conducts a character study of psychedelic focus that submits us to one mathematical genius’ delusional obsessions.
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The New Boy (2023)
As the mystical powers of one mute Indigenous Australian boy begin to emerge within a 1940s Catholic orphanage in The New Boy, Warwick Thornton delicately weaves a magical realist allegory of spirituality, assimilation, and colonialism’s stranglehold on ancient cultures, set against the backdrop of the beautifully unfathomable outback.
