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.
Yankee Doodle Dandy’s jingoistic politics are unsophisticated, but its nostalgic sentiment is strong, beating back whatever accusations of outdated mawkishness might be thrown its way with James Cagney’s energetic take on Broadway star George M. Cohan, whose dynamic presence and patriotic showtunes are rendered by Michael Curtiz onscreen as a propulsive musical biopic.
Though the title I Killed My Mother explicitly refers to Hubert’s lie that his titular parent is dead, it also becomes apparent that this is something she painfully experiences every single day, revealing a remarkably mature voice in 19-year-old director Xavier Dolan who radiates these complex character dynamics out into a neatly composed visual style and rhythmic formal structure.
Just like the infectious disease slowly killing Hud’s family ranch, this selfish child of the Old West callously destroys the proud legacy that his ancestors spent lifetimes nurturing, as Paul Newman takes the abrasive, hyper-masculine archetype of the individualistic hero to its logical conclusion against Martin Ritt’s bleak landscapes of a dying Texan town.
Armed with a penchant for riveting visual storytelling, the Coen Brothers deliver a neo-noir vision of Texas in Blood Simple made up of grimy, low-lit bars and fatefully botched murders, navigating this moral wasteland with profuse dramatic irony and an omniscient perspective that seeks to understand its place in a godless universe.
