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.
Michael Powell’s fatalistic contemplations are lifted to metaphysical levels in A Matter of Life and Death where one man who cheats death must argue his case to keep living, his soul hanging in a precarious balance between two worlds – one dominated by surreal black-and-white set pieces, the other a Technicolor assertion of life’s spectacular beauty.
For an idealistic filmmaker like Richard Linklater, the future has never looked brighter than it does in the hands of a child, and in blending the fantasy of a young boy becoming the first person to walk on the moon and the mundane details of life in 1960s Texas, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood effectively justifies humanity’s own naïve ambition and excitement.
Krzysztof Kieslowski lays heavily into the dramatic irony of his characters’ hidden interconnections in Three Colours: Red, saturating his beautiful mise-en-scene with a fiery warmth that unites neighbouring strangers in an invisible fraternity, their intertwining paths governed only by the irrational whims of chance.
