1970

As the title Husbands might suggest, wives are largely absent from the efforts of these emotionally inept men to deal with the repressed grief of losing a friend, thereby letting John Cassavetes’ plotless realism and intrusive camera uncomfortably linger on its exhausting portrait of middle-aged, toxic masculinity.

The sharp angles and lines of Bernardo Bertolucci’s immaculate, austere tableaux of wartime Europe are as equally unyielding as the dogmatic socio-political landscape they make up, lending this incisive attack on unthinking fascist ideologies an extra edge of bitter resentment.