There are few Golden Age Hollywood directors as willing to embrace the comical leading power of his female stars as Howard Hawks, but it is through Marilyn Monroe’s powerfully mesmeric screen presence carrying vibrant musical numbers and hilarious visual gags that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes becomes all the more flamboyantly intoxicating.
In conceiving of a shady corporation that turns lonely men into political assassins in The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula takes full control of the prying investigations and double crosses driving his tightly-wound narrative, letting his camera linger on those sinister, dark spaces that conceal the puppet strings manipulated by faceless elites.
A sudden immersion into the screwball comedy genre might be the perfect challenge to the stagnant lifestyle of middle-class yuppie Charlie, as through his impromptu road trip with the freewheeling Lulu, Jonathan Demme sends Something Wild spinning off in hilarious and terrifying directions, drawing us into the orbit of characters trying to reconcile their own contradictory, innate desires.
While The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’s indictments of Thatcherism’s anti-intellectualism operate as a sharp political allegory in the vein of George Orwell, Peter Greenaway’s opulent Baroque aesthetic lifts it to another transcendent level altogether, transforming a restaurant into a gallery of vivid tableaux illustrating the horrific abuses of one gangster’s despicably gluttonous conquest.
The spirit of silent comedy is kept alive in Jacque Tati’s eccentric satires, sending up the inefficient distractions of modern civilisation through bizarrely constructed architectural monuments and gags, many of which stand among cinema’s most brilliantly odd set pieces.
On every level of its stylistic construction, Mr. Turner inhabits the watercolours of its titular historical painter with ethereal elegance, and though this exquisite aesthetic initially seems at odds with the coarse, prickly figure at its centre, Mike Leigh’s exceptional orchestration of such beautiful contradictions affectingly reveals the complex creative processes shared by both artists.
As a leading figure in cinematic, philosophical storytelling, Krzysztof Kieslowski probes metaphysical questions of fate, morality, and spirituality, using sensual colour palettes and symbolic cutaways to better understand the lives that lie just beyond our immediate perspectives.
In Fitzcarraldo’s absurd dream of building an opera house in the Amazon jungle and his even stranger endeavour of hauling a giant steamship up a mountain, Werner Herzog centres him as a tragic figure in an epic fable of extraordinary ambition, fully consuming his mind with a megalomania that threatens the foundations of his own conceited, fragile mortality.
With a commitment to raw realism and segmented narrative structures, Jia Zhangke crafts scathing indictments of iron-fisted authority, modernity, and globalisation, setting himself up as a significant leading figure among the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers.
The inverted journeys of self-control and surrender that lonely drifter Freddie Quell and cult leader Lancaster Dodd travel along go beyond excellent screenwriting, but also affirm The Master’s extraordinary formal achievement, as Paul Thomas Anderson layers every single interaction with patterns that elusively float these soulmates through a post-war America lost in its identity.
