With its staggering set pieces and consequential narrative stakes, John Wick: Chapter 4 ends this series on a majestic cinematic high, not just confirming Chad Stahelski’s well-earned position among our great modern action directors, but also his talents as a storyteller communicating through striking theological symbolism.
Beneath Ingmar Bergman’s eloquently cutting dialogue in Through a Glass Darkly is a family struggling in the absence of spiritual guidance, magnified to an even greater extent by the isolation of the island where they are vacationing, and yet finding the chance for redemptive grace in the smallest demonstrations of love.
There is certainly something poignantly poetic in the way Guru Dutt’s premature passing mirrors the ending of his final film, tracing the tragic fall of a once-famous filmmaker, but Kaagaz Ke Phool also captures the essence of an artistic imagination profuse with creative joy, lyrically reminiscing the love which inspired him to craft some of India’s finest cinema.
Often cited as the peak of Bollywood’s Golden Age, Pyaasa flows with incredible joy, sensitive eloquence, and profound cynicism, adopting the passionate romanticism of the struggling Urdu poet at its centre with lyrical camerawork, and marking the musical epic as Guru Dutt’s crowning achievement.
Nineteenth century China has never felt so tangibly cinematic as it does in Flowers of Shanghai, examining the blurred boundaries that lie between sex and business in its most frequented pleasure houses, and positioning us through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s floating camera and elliptical structure as silent observers of its sharply gendered politics.
Christian and pagan symbolism may be nothing new for Ingmar Bergman, but their manifestation in The Virgin Spring through such visceral violence is punishing even by his standards, thoughtfully considering in this parable of murder and revenge how virtue might survive our most guilty, godless instincts.
Humanity has never looked as simultaneously kind and cruel as it does through the eyes of the world’s lowliest beast in EO, as Jerzy Skolimowski’s elliptical direction effortlessly drifts us along one donkey’s nomadic odyssey, unveiling profoundly graceful meditations on our most fundamental nature.
The nervous mistrust built into the duplicitous narrative and motifs in The Woman in the Window speaks to film noir’s most classical archetypes, and in further literalising the genre’s expressionist nightmares Fritz Lang delves even deeper into one naïve professor’s dreams of seduction, murder, and subterfuge.
The motifs of monsters and mirrors drawn through Pinky’s obsession with local popular girl Millie make for some powerfully abstract imagery in 3 Women, finding remarkable psychological tension in Robert Altman’s enigmatic blending of female identities, as well as in its setting of a modern culture where individuality is everything.
Nosferatu the Vampyre may emerge within a long lineage of Dracula adaptations, and yet is infused on every cinematic level with Werner Herzog’s fear and awe at a godless world, lulling us into its slow-burn narrative which drifts by with tragic, hypnotic dread.
