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.
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 beginnings.
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.
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 mistress.
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 of life.
Rian Johnson once again proves himself to be a master of misdirection in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, targeting his biting satire at a private island of wealthy celebrities partying in the middle of the pandemic, and constructing around them a winding, hugely entertaining murder mystery as densely layered as the titular vegetable.
The implication of the title If…. is not a question, but an unfinished dream, as Lindsay Anderson conjectures a surreal world parallel to our own that assembles the strict hierarchy of a British boy’s boarding school into a pointed political allegory of tyrants, revolutionaries, and homoerotic power plays.
Avatar may not be James Cameron’s most consistently flawless work, but it is certainly at least his most purely ambitious, using innovative digital technology to serve his incredible visual artistry and immersive worldbuilding, both of which place this rich, ecological allegory among the most monumental achievements of genre filmmaking.
Guillermo del Toro’s foray into gorgeous stop-motion animation is perfectly suited the Italian fable of Pinocchio, though true to his darkly monstrous obsessions, this interpretation is haunted by a tragic existentialism, using the historical setting of fascist Italy to frame questions around fatherhood, blind obedience, and the value of fleeting mortality.
Alejandro Iñárritu’s sprawling abstraction of one Mexican filmmaker’s existential musings may be absurdly funny at points, but in Bardo’s surreal, stream-of-consciousness dive into his lucid dreams, it is also a deeply spiritual work, building a mountain of rich visual metaphors to deliver one of the most formally complex and cinematically ambitious films of the past few years.
