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Funny Girl (1968)
Whatever compassionate respect that comedienne and Broadway star Fanny Brice was denied in her lifetime, Barbara Streisand and William Wyler make up for in their representation of her as a sensitively layered figure in Funny Girl, radiating an upbeat irreverence and vibrant musicality out from this subversive innovator of women’s roles in American entertainment.
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Port of Call (1948)
Romantic melodrama may be the basis of Port of Call’s romantic storyline, and yet in the authentic location shooting and miserable suffering of its suicidal protagonist, Ingmar Bergman imbues it with a discomforting grit inspired by Italy’s neorealist movement, setting in a bleak tone that sees old traumas surface and threaten the chance for new…
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Shame (2011)
Pleasure and pain are woven into a single paradox within Shame’s study of a self-loathing sex addict, suffocating him in an oppressive frigidity that presses in through Steve McQueen’s cold, blue palettes, and hypnotising him in a reverie of montages moving through the same wretched, compulsive cycles.
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A Ship Bound for India (1947)
An air of fleeting transience hangs over A Ship Bound for India, embodied literally by the industrial ships sailing from one dock to the next, and formally weaved into the narrative as an extended, nostalgic flashback, revealing a confidence in Ingmar Bergman’s direction that probes the Oedipal dynamics between a sailor, his father, and his…
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
The sentimental heart of Avatar: The Way of Water is not lost in Cameron’s ingenious, visual invention, but rather melds with its spectacle to sweep us away on waves of transcendent wonder, spectacularly building the world of Pandora out into alien islands and sentient reefs where we are left to marvel at the remarkable abnormality…
