Through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s formal severity and exacting aesthetic, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom stares unflinchingly into the repellent darkness of humanity’s soul, tracing the systematic torture of young captives subjected to the relentlessly sadistic games orchestrated by four fascist overlords.
Perhaps the only thing longer than the title Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the film itself, as Chantal Akerman forces us to feel every passing minute of one homemaker’s fastidious routine, along with its gradual, psychological decay into exasperating chaos.
Stealing a dead man’s identity seems like the perfect opportunity for television journalist David Locke to escape his unfulfilling life in The Passenger, though as Michelangelo Antonioni drifts him through a perplexing labyrinth of his own making, we are implicated in his confrontation with life’s empty, senseless banality.
Even as the mysteries of the human mind elude us throughout Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s precise control over the raw elements of time and life itself poetically sink us into its surreal depths, opening a portal into nostalgic childhood memories distorted by the dreams, doubts, and desires that have emerged in the decades since.
The complicated love story behind the bank robbery and police stand-off of Dog Day Afternoon was never going to survive the media sensationalism around it, though Sidney Lumet’s gripping crime narrative offers the two criminals at its centre great sensitivity in its nuanced characterisations, sympathetically studying the pressures and poor decisions that led them to this moment.
In its organic progression between its sprawling narrative threads, Nashville carries the sense that Robert Altman could point his camera in any direction and discover a new set of characters as equally as intriguing as the rest of his ensemble, constructing a satirical image of this musical city that is pervaded by a defiantly bright-eyed Southern idealism.
Woody Allen takes aim at 19th century Russian literature in his off-beat period piece Love and Death, smashing through those quaint conventions of cultural and cinematic history to fashion an entirely new kind of artistic statement out of the fragments left behind.
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.
The greed of men has often been a preoccupation of John Huston throughout his career, but never has expanded it to the spectacular, godlike proportions we witness here in The Man Who Would Be King, which sets a rollicking adventure against an epic historical backdrop of nationalistic British imperialism.
