As a grieving family ponders the recorded recollections of their broken robotic son in After Yang, Koganada forms a poignant commemoration of those complex lives that exist just beyond our periphery, studied and savoured through the refractive lens of memory where old ideas find new life in the present.
The implicit promise made in the title Everything Everywhere All at Once is about as equally ambitious as it is precarious, setting up a maximalist piece of cinema that flits across alternate universes, wildly fires off montages, and deals in absurd, genre-blending humour, pondering the relative value of individuality within the grand scope of existence.
David Lynch’s skilful layering of illusions in Mulholland Drive turns our focus away from the reality of one aspiring Hollywood actress’ insidious deeds, and towards the guilt, hope, and resentment which fester inside her, piecing together new, surreal realities out of the fragments of old ones she would much rather forget.
It is an unusual family portrait that Douglas Sirk paints in Imitation of Life, foregrounding two pairs of single mothers and daughters struggling against the 1950s American patriarchy, racial prejudices, and each other, their expressive sensitivities flourishing to form delicate cinematic paintings of privilege and social adversity.
In the brutal, textured world that Robert Eggers builds around the Norse folktale of Viking prince Amleth, The Northman comes alive, approaching the detailed design of every crude wooden village and animal-skin costume with a visceral authenticity to deliver an awe-inspiring, sensory venture into the heart of obsessive vengeance.
There is a fragility to the precision of Frank Capra’s visual and narrative creations in Lost Horizon, establishing an order in the Eastern utopia of Shangri-La that is threatened by the arrival of cynical British expats, powerfully backing up this grand moral fable with potent mythological archetypes of paradise, innocence, and corruption.
All the money and oil in Texas can’t save the Hadley family from its own self-sabotage, and in following their downfall in Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk crafts an eloquent Southern Gothic tale of bitterness, envy, and impotence, matching its colourful melodrama with an equally affecting visual style.
Any instance where pure goodness and elegant beauty wins out over insensitivity in Magnificent Obsession is infinitely precious to a soft-hearted melodramatist like Douglas Sirk, as his leading of a spoiled playboy down a path of moral rehabilitation poetically transforms him into an image of the selfless man whose death he indirectly caused.
The breathtaking elegance of Hero’s martial arts choreography is only matched by Yimou Zhang’s own meticulous production design, its vibrant assortment of colour palettes defining several varying accounts of one swordsman’s epic quest to defeat three assassins in ancient China, and stylistically elucidating the historical value of each.
Such is Kathryn Bigelow’s fine control over action-driven sequences that even as Zero Dark Thirty delivers on its raw thrills, she also manages to coordinate them remarkably tightly in her narrative’s driving pursuit of justice, following the CIA’s lengthy hunt for Osama Bin Laden over ten gruelling years.
