Within the opulent palaces of 19th century Bavaria, Luchino Visconti’s operatic staging exquisitely details King Ludwig II’s decadent dreams and gradual deterioration, seeking to understand the legacy of this historical empire through the strange mix of sexual insecurities, mental illnesses, and artistic obsessions which roil around in his lonely, troubled mind.
Whether Briony could ever find genuine redemption after irreparably destroying the lives of two lovers is the provocative question that she may never get an answer to, and in Joe Wright’s impressionistic camerawork and ever-shifting structure, we too find it eerily winding its way through Atonement’s formal puzzle of lies, truths, and alternate perspectives.
It is an unexpectedly self-aware period drama that Sebastián Lelio composes in The Wonder, deconstructing its own form to examine the purpose it holds as a piece of metafiction, but it is through such profound introspection over one girl’s miraculous fast in 19th century Ireland that he paradoxically draws us even deeper into its richly designed world of believers and sceptics.
Edgar G. Ulmer savours every demented moment of conflict between Bela Lugosi’s creepy psychiatrist and Boris Karloff’s prowling Satanist in The Black Cat, painting over its uneven narrative pacing with a macabre expressionism that makes for a darkly mesmerising occult horror.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s enigmatic odyssey through a criminal underworld of sex traffickers, drug lords, and vampires demands a patient willingness to fall under its neon-soaked trance, as Copenhagen Cowboy invites us to traverse the psychological terrain of its stoic, otherworldly protagonist through a mesmerisingly surreal quest for vengeance.
If Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara represents the Old South in Gone with the Wind, then her selfish vanity paints a pricklier portrait of this historical culture than one might expect, deserving nothing less than the sweeping Technicolor grandeur of what may be Hollywood’s most ambitious historical epic put to film.
Dr. Moreau’s twisted biological experiments are brought to disturbing, expressionistic life in Island of Lost Souls, immortalising H.G. Welles’ classic sci-fi story onscreen as a horror fable complete with fearsome prosthetics, treacherous villainy, and a tightly-plotted script cautioning against the dangers of interfering with nature.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s bold artistic statement on the eternal struggle between fascism and socialism comes full circle in his period epic 1900, echoing formal patterns across the lives of two friends from opposing sides of the class divide, and landing the full weight of their intrinsic connection as operatically as the decades of Italian interwar history they represent.
There are whodunits which may be more sophisticated in their construction, but See How They Run still makes for a visually adventurous and hilariously fun meta-study of the genre, borrowing a great deal from Wes Anderson’s stylistic repertoire to break down and assemble its conventions into a sharply witty mystery set in 1950s London.
Marie and Henrik aren’t the first lovers in an Ingmar Bergman film to be brutally torn apart, but they are first to be developed with such visual splendour and warmth, as Summer Interlude dreamily calls back to those nostalgic, youthful vacations that seemed to go on forever, flourishing in the tiny tensions and pleasures of one’s first romance and heartbreak.
