Don’t Look Up is sure to aggravate those who previously appreciated Adam McKay for his incisive political discernment, but the energetic storytelling and blunt, irreverent satire on display here is more an act of angry, hilarious, and provocative catharsis than anything else.
Through some force of nature or the winds of fate, poetic justice finds its way home in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as John Huston undercuts humanity’s indulgent pursuit of wealth in this cautionary tale of gold-mining prospectors and brutal bandits.
The obscure mystery at the heart of Zodiac is made all the more frustrating by the pinpoint precision with which David Fincher attacks his plotting, cinematography, and characterisation, shifting the focus away from its fruitless puzzles and onto a study of psychological obsession.
Memories flow like water in Distance Voices, Still Lives, seamlessly gliding from one to the next through intuitive connections and poetic tangents, bringing a photo book quality to Terence Davies’ nostalgic ode to the love and struggles of his old-fashioned, working-class family.
Four loosely connected episodes of violence based on real Chinese news stories come together in a Touch of Sin to sketch out a landscape of anger and frustration, as Jia Zhangke pushes the boundaries of his usual neo-realistic style until they start to overlap with traditional crime thriller conventions.
In Sátántangó’s destitute Hungarian village of dilapidated buildings and free-roaming farm animals, a Messiah figure seemingly returns from the dead, and Béla Tarr crafts a devastatingly bleak, suffocatingly drab, and completely mesmerising landscape of spiritual deficiency.
The layers of subtext and symbolism that flow through Don’t Look Now may take multiple viewings to fully appreciate, but in Nicolas Roeg’s fluid editing which swirls between cryptic images of blood, churches, water, and grotesque representations of death, its feverish atmosphere takes hold, haunting us with the ghosts of events that have already taken place, and some that are still yet to happen.
James Whale steps up the subtext, camp theatrics, and Gothic aesthetic in his sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, delivering not just a lynchpin of horror cinema, but a piece of film that feels even truer to his own humanistic and dramatic sensibilities.
In turning Rome’s architecture and geography into a living, breathing environment in Roman Holiday, William Wyler crafts a romantic adventure for newspaperman Joe and runaway princess Ann, and offers Audrey Hepburn a perfectly charming setting for displays of natural magnetism that carry entire scenes.
Though sin has implanted itself firmly in the soul of gambler William Tell, his attempts to soften its impact by putting up physical and emotional barriers between him and his environment points towards a deep complexity in his character, as Paul Schrader turns The Card Counter into a masterfully rigorous study of regret, self-discipline, and atonement.
