There is incredible subtlety and depth to Charlotte Wells’ character work in Aftersun, as one woman’s ruminations over a vacation she went on with her deeply troubled father effectively takes off the rose-tinted glasses of her childhood, and retrospectively pieces together a fragmented portrait of his stifled, internal suffering.
The romantic fantasies that young model Doris and her agent Susanne chase down are blindly hinged on the belief that men are not lazy, mediocre creatures, and Ingmar Bergman delicately maps out the psychological terrain of these compulsive desires all through Dreams, leading both generations of women down parallel paths of inevitable disappointment.
Alfonso Cuarón cements his status as an all-time great director with a black-and-white memory piece, Ari Aster takes the horror genre to a new level with fresh artistic sensibilities, and a hyper-kinetic animation deconstructs decades of superhero stories.
A direct translation of Ikiru to English is ‘To Live’, and it is in formally binding one dying bureaucrat’s revitalisation closely to this ideal that Akira Kurosawa gracefully transforms his existential study of mortality into an introspective consideration of life’s intrinsic purpose, infusing this profound spiritual journey with melancholy visual detail.
A Lesson in Love is an impressive display of comic versatility for a relatively minor Ingmar Bergman film, sending his sober marital drama crashing into idiosyncratic foibles where screwball humour, sophisticated wit, and savage feuds intermingle.
Christopher Nolan shakes up the war genre with his tremendous editing, Denis Villeneuve astoundingly builds on a decades-old classic with a phenomenal sequel, and Paul Schrader’s theological character study features Ethan Hawke in a self-destructive spiral.
The discovery of a horrific secret within the isolated Mennonite colony of Women Talking leaves some difficult decisions to be made by its female population, and through Sarah Polley’s bleak yet sensitive direction, she transforms it into a nuanced allegory of patriarchal exploitation at large, pushing it to a terrifying, unpredictable tipping point.
Life is a circus that creates entertainment out of humiliation, Ingmar Bergman posits in Sawdust and Tinsel, and in his rich staging and screenwriting he needles its existential drama with a finer, wittier point than ever before, finding both sympathy and pity for its hapless fools doomed to eternal ridicule.
Damien Chazelle’s ode to Hollywood musicals becomes one of the genre’s best, Jim Jarmusch’s impressively formal work celebrates the beauty of routine, and Denis Villeneuve finds a new linguistic spin on the alien science-fiction film.
Close is a work of incredible mourning and devoted realism for Lukas Dhont, telling the tale of two childhood friends driven apart by the social pressures of adolescent masculinity, and often leaving the most profound emotions unspoken as we silently sit in understated reaction shots connecting them to a confusing, corrupt world.
