Jia Zhangke remains as engaged in the globalisation of industrial China as ever with his foray into documentary filmmaking, as 24 City’s experimental blend of authentic and scripted interviews suggest a shift into an uncertain, postmodern future where luxurious, high-rise apartments displace tight-knit working communities.
As Detective Jim McLeod’s personal and professional worlds collide in the web of narrative threads that emerge over the course of one day inside a police station, Wyler’s deep focus staging of his cast brings layers of both visual and subtextual significance to Detective Story, turning it into a character study of an unforgiving, unsalvageable figure.
It is from Stanley Kubrick’s uncomfortable philosophical questions regarding free will and sin that his inspired, repulsive aesthetic of nude sculptures and phallic symbols explodes outwards, marking the dystopian British society of A Clockwork Orange as one which has fallen prey to its pleasure-seeking impulses.
Denis Villeneuve succeeds in giving Frank Herbert’s epic space opera Dune the cinematic treatment on a grand scale, digging into its Greek mythological archetypes as a compelling canvas upon which he intricately paints out awe-inspiring civilisations, landscapes, and worlds of historic and futuristic significance.
With its protagonist’s intense attraction towards vehicles, string of cold-blooded murders, and fraudulent identity, Julia Ducournau’s Titane sketches out a disturbing portrait of a character as unpredictable as she is brutally misanthropic, preferring the cold sheen of metal over the soft touch of a human.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed would still be a great feat of filmmaking even if it were the hundredth or thousandth feature-length animation, but the fact that Lotte Reiniger’s imaginative Middle Eastern fable of magic, adventure, and shadow puppetry is the first of its kind is simply remarkable.
There may be screwball comedies that can match His Girl Friday in sheer narrative lunacy, but Howard Hawks’ satirical take on the newspaper industry stands unparalleled in its breakneck pacing which, when combined with its rhythmic, rattling screenplay and the verbal gifts of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, becomes an accelerating effort to keep outdoing its own hysteria.
In his deft weaving together of disparate historical accounts and film genres, Satoshi Kon’s existential probing of questions regarding truth, fiction, celebrity, and purpose in Millennium Actress becomes a magnificently collaged narrative, reflecting the inexorable human ambition of its characters to attain that which impossibly lies beyond the reach of both reality and imagination.
Through László Nemes’ rigid, principled application of close-up tracking shots and a shallow focus that keeps the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp setting just barely out of sight, he effectively narrows the scope of Son of Saul to a single, harrowing perspective of an otherwise monumental blight on human history, and in doing so delivers one of the most traumatic depictions of war committed to film.
Stanley Kubrick’s astonishing display of picturesque beauty and grace haunts every frame of Barry Lyndon, and through this he sets an impossibly rigid standard of perfection that his messy, flawed characters cannot live up to, even as they strive for self-aggrandising legacies and traditions that only reveal their feeble hubris.
