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Enemy (2013)
The surreal, sepia vision of Toronto that Denis Villeneuve shapes around his mysteriously linked doppelgängers in Enemy often feels as if it is ensnaring them in a paralysing spider web, psychologically binding them so tightly together through its cryptic motifs and obscure narrative that they might as well be two sides of one unfaithful, insecure…
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Gentleman Jim (1942)
The grand long shots and rapid montage editing of Raoul Walsh’s boxing set pieces in Gentleman Jim are well matched to the agile fighting technique of its historical subject, James J. Corbett, using its action to lightly probe the brutish, primal nature of our sporting passions and the concerted efforts to reconcile those with our…
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Widows (2018)
Steve McQueen’s dip into the crime genre with Widows shrewdly carries on his style of uncompromising filmmaking, using dazzling camerawork and slick pacing to navigate a sprawling, rolling narrative which sees the consequences of one failed robbery ricochet through Chicago’s gangs, politics, and the grieving wives who soon decide to collaborate on their own grand…
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Amsterdam (2022)
There is certainly madness to David O. Russell’s elaborate plotting of conspiracies and murders throughout Amsterdam, but with his intimately framed close-ups and stylish rendering of 1930s New York, he builds a humorously sweet affection between the main trio of accidental detectives that outlasts any vicious political manoeuvring surrounding them.
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Blonde (2022)
Accusations of abhorrent crudity may be fairly lobbed at the subject matter of Blonde, but certainly not at Andrew Dominik’s talents as a provocative, implicating filmmaker, solemnly studying Norma Jean and Marilyn Monroe as dual identities in perpetual conflict, and disturbingly manifesting their world as a surreal, existential nightmare psychologically fusing them together.
