Edward Yang’s mastery over cinematic realism is absolutely essential to the heartrending authenticity of A Brighter Summer Day, carefully examining the overlooked tragedies of Taiwan’s modern history through a lens that seeks genuine understanding of its aching sorrow, and exploring the many facets of its social strife in virtually every frame.
The guilty paradox of lamenting New York City’s moral decay while actively contributing to its degradation as a drug dealer eats away at insomniac John LeTour in Light Sleeper, and within Paul Schrader’s complex character study of shame and atonement, it evolves into a self-aware melancholy, reconsidering the unsavoury direction his life has taken.
The ripples of history that would go on to generate monumental waves can be felt all through Young Mr Lincoln, where John Ford turns the future president’s origins as a judicious Illinoisian lawyer into a historical fable, offering us insight into the storytelling traditions and legal battles that have shaped an entire nation’s values of liberty and justice.
There is certainly some awe-inspiring beauty lost in an anthropological study of human nature as intensive as Mon Oncle d’Amerique, and yet in the formal cohesion of such unconventional motifs, collaged narrative threads, and punctuative editing, Alain Resnais devises a truly compelling piece of dense, intellectual poetry, dedicated to our most unifying quirks and habits.
Futuristic visual designs do not always mesh so well with low-budget location shooting, but for a postmodern master of cinematic form like Jean-Luc Godard, such delightful incongruity only strengthens his deconstruction of film noir and science-fiction genres in Alphaville, which both examines and becomes an act of rebellion against artistic censorship in its very construction.
Alex Garland’s nightmarish journey through a troubled widow’s mind and her retreat to a town of identical strangers elusively edges towards a disturbing culmination of its lush stylistic flourishes and grotesquely absurd imagery, floating Men along the eerie rhythms that pass through spiritual and mythological iconography.
In its acute examinations of racial oppression, Black Girl stands proudly as a tentpole of both African cinema and Ousmane Sembène’s directorial career, evoking the stylistic sensibilities of the French New Wave while forming a sensitive, post-colonial allegory that leads us through one Senegalese woman’s memoirs into her traumatic experience as a domestic slave.
It takes a truly charismatic movie star to command the screen the way Julia Roberts does as Erin Brockovich’s titular beauty queen turned lawyer, delivering whip-smart takedowns and monologues while on her pursuit of justice, and together with Steven Soderbergh energetically infusing an infectious passion into this gripping biopic.
It might be a barren beauty which infests the deteriorating Texas oil town of The Last Picture Show, but as we grow to understand the small lives and histories dotted through its community, Peter Bogdanovich also sensitively paints it out as a tactile landscape of feeble dreams and disappointments.
Almost Famous rolls along with all the thrust and exhilaration of a rock concert, as steeped in 70s pop culture as Cameron Crowe himself, and showing off a skilful tonal balance that ties each comedic and tragic set piece together into a nostalgic reflection on a musical era as joyfully uninhibited as it was potentially soul-destroying.
