The partnership of Gilbert & Sullivan becomes a rich historical canvas upon which Mike Leigh grafts reflections of his own creative processes in Topsy-Turvy, and yet in its gloriously lavish interiors and the depth of the ensemble’s great talents, it also becomes an ode to those artists who can put aside their egos to share in the joy of artistic collaboration.
In drawing on the philosophies of his literary idols, Abel Gance crafts a breath-taking piece of epic cinematic poetry in La Roue, breaking the shackles of conventional silent filmmaking to explore the weight of obsession, guilt, love, and death on a man’s conscience over the course of his mortal life.
Beneath the epic weight of Margaret’s three-hour runtime, Kenneth Lonergan’s rich, operatic character drama holds strong, using a layered emotional journey of guilt and rage to speak directly to the specific kind of trauma that unified New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11.
Run Lola Run is a showcase of remarkable rapid-fire editing and energetic camerawork, but just as compelling is Tom Twyker’s segmented formal structure, attacking questions of fatalism and free will across three alternate timelines of a single thrilling narrative.
The relative lack of songs in Lola should not be taken to mean that the film unfolds with any less panache, vigour, or sensitivity than a traditional movie-musical, as Jacques Demy’s brisk tracking shots and delicate editing brings a rhythmic sensibility to his musings over long-lost lovers.
Though Lynne Ramsay’s vision of working-class 1970s Scotland in ‘Ratcatcher’ is an infested cesspool of garbage bags, nits, and rodents, her hypnotic editing offers a tint of whimsical delicacy to these otherwise harsh environments.
Ridley Scott’s formally astounding interrogation of history as it is lived and perceived from moment to moment offers great understanding to those whose voices are lost to the past, all the while examining the inherent unreliability of any one account as the sole vessel of truth.
In transplanting his usual explorations of tradition and community from America’s old West into a rural Welsh village, John Ford finds a nostalgic beauty in the Victorian-era working class ideals of How Green Was My Valley, binding his huge cast of actors and extras together as one communal, synchronised mass.
Gangster film conventions find new life in Jacques Audiard’s magical realist drama A Prophet, grounding the rags-to-riches character arc of Algerian teen and prison inmate Malik El Djebena in the complex racial tensions of a modern-day, multicultural France.
In setting up a formal clash between his brazen stylistic experiments and the stagnant setting of a traditional Ukrainian village, Sergei Parajanov pushes the focus of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors past this narrow-minded society and towards the haunting mysticism which lies both beyond its boundaries and within its own characters.
