By casting himself as the omniscient narrator of Two English Girls, François Truffaut imbues the love triangle between one aspiring Parisian writer and the two sisters he deeply loves with a tender, literary quality, playfully savouring every romantic and sexual encounter over nine years of their young lives.
The Devils may be set during the witch trials of 17th century France, and yet Ken Russell’s cynical condemnation of religious tyranny escapes a narrow relegation to the distant past, infusing his cautionary tale with a bitter, anachronistic timelessness.
The pursuit of knowledge is nothing more than a path to existential insecurity in The Andromeda Strain, sending a team of scientists deep underground to investigate the terrestrial arrival of a deadly alien organism, and developing a terrifying allegory for widespread nuclear warfare that Robert Wise delineates with methodical, formal precision.
The Touch may be one of Ingmar Bergman’s plainer stylistic efforts, but his wielding of theological symbolism to interrogate a broken love triangle is deft, bitterly driving the Madonna’s degraded image and a tainted Garden of Eden between his doomed lovers.
Trafic may not possess the sheer ambition of Jacques Tati’s previous films, but his resourcefulness remains remarkable, uncovering rich satire in recognising that the attempts of drivers trying to get somewhere while helplessly sitting in stagnant crowds of high-tech, metal boxes may be the ultimate paradox of an inept modern society.
It might be a barren beauty which infests the deteriorating Texas oil town of The Last Picture Show, but as we grow to understand the small lives and histories dotted through its community, Peter Bogdanovich also sensitively paints it out as a tactile landscape of feeble dreams and disappointments.
Around the hair-raising cat-and-mouse chase between detective Popeye Doyle and French mobster Charnier, William Friedkin constructs a gritty vision of New York City flooded with stagnant puddles and coated in at least a few layers of grime, melding narrative and setting to deliver a biting, authentically cynical crime thriller in The French Connection.
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.
