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La Promesse (1996)
The Dardenne Brothers prove their dedication to social realism in La Promesse, tying their narrative up into knotty moral predicaments around one teenager’s vow to a dying, undocumented immigrant, and through its tiny symbolic developments it progresses with archetypal formality, pushing him to be better than the unjust world he grew up in.
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The English Patient (1996)
Wistful memories and melancholy regrets swirl all through The English Patient’s vast, time-leaping narrative, developing its gentle ruminations over national identity into a historical epic of extraordinary beauty, as Anthony Minghella uses the sprawling emptiness of the desert to underscore the majesty and romance of the larger-than-life characters traversing it.
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2014 in Cinema
Alejandro Iñárritu’s studies celebrity and ego in his one-take wonder, Wes Anderson throws back to mid-century Budapest with his immaculate pastel artistry, and Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age epic breaks new ground in realist cinema.
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Broken Blossoms (1919)
Broken Blossoms may be a simple, tragic fable of ill-fated lovers, though such eloquent visual poetry refreshes its archetypes through crisp close-ups and propulsive editing, inviting the sort of intimacy that D.W. Griffith alone realised in these early years of cinema was uniquely suited to this young, nascent artform.
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2013 in Cinema
Paweł Pawlikowski delivers a haunting meditation on the long-lasting trauma of the Holocaust, Richard Linklater ties off his decades-spanning Before trilogy, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-tinted violence heavily polarises audiences.
