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.
Haunted by cannibalistic urges ever since she was young, Maren sets out on a nomadic journey of self-discovery across America with fellow ‘eater’ Lee in Bones and All, and through Luca Guadagnino’s morbidly nuanced characterisations, he tenderly transforms this horror-tinged premise into a coming-of-age tale, a sweet romance, and a sensitive, queer allegory.
She Said wisely does not dip into the familiar aftermath of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse allegations, but rather centres on the painstaking investigations that toppled over dominoes towards the earth-shattering exposé, building an ensemble of affecting performances atop a sensitive screenplay that carries us through stretches of otherwise uninspired visual direction.
All through Out of Sight, the individual paths of suave bank robber Jack Foley and federal marshal Karen Sisco wind around each other like a tantalising dance, passionately underscored by Steven Soderbergh’s hyper-stylised editing and non-linear structure that build a sprawling, fatalistic world, and which drive the two ends of the law together in a romantic embrace.
Through The Menu’s gradual descent to gastronomical madness, Mark Mylod crafts a biting horror satire of up-class foodie culture full of all its recognisably niche archetypes, plunging one group of wealthy restaurant goers into the twisted mind of a resentful chef determined to inflict upon them the disturbing consequences of their arrogant, commercialised pretension.
Ingmar Bergman screenplays are rarely so blunt as the melodrama he delivers in It Always Rains on Our Love, and yet the touch of magical realism he injects into this fable of endless hardships is charming nonetheless, formally rounding out a heartfelt call for compassion towards society’s young outcasts.
Even in his escapist storytelling, Paul Verhoeven still finds a way to let the philosophical questions of identity and perception uncomfortably linger in our minds, sweeping us away on Total Recall’s waves of outlandish retrofuturism and thrilling set pieces that lead us into the depths of a Martian conspiracy, though never letting us forget the existential possibility of its unreality.
Random chaos defines Barry Egan’s world in Punch-Drunk Love, reaching out across his work and personal life to diminish his meek existence, and yet there is a balanced coordination across every level of Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredibly formal filmmaking in this offbeat romantic comedy that finds colourful, delicate harmony among the dissonance.
As the title Husbands might suggest, wives are largely absent from the efforts of these emotionally inept men to deal with the repressed grief of losing a friend, thereby letting John Cassavetes’ plotless realism and intrusive camera uncomfortably linger on its exhausting portrait of middle-aged, toxic masculinity.
Howard Hawks wields his convoluted narrative like a weapon in The Big Sleep, where fatalistic forces wind together in a treacherous labyrinth seeking to ensnare Humphrey Bogart’s cynical private detective, Phillip Marlowe, thereby immersing us into a gloriously pulpy film noir that sizzles with sexual innuendoes and coy provocations.
