While The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’s indictments of Thatcherism’s anti-intellectualism operate as a sharp political allegory in the vein of George Orwell, Peter Greenaway’s opulent Baroque aesthetic lifts it to another transcendent level altogether, transforming a restaurant into a gallery of vivid tableaux illustrating the horrific abuses of one gangster’s despicably gluttonous conquest.
For all its authentic grounding in the culture of 1980s Poland, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog remains a mystical piece of theological cinema for its complex examination of the Ten Commandments in a series of contemporary moral fables, collectively provoking deep contemplation through an omniscient perspective akin to that of an all-seeing God.
The devastating loss which Do the Right Thing slowly builds towards might initially seem at odds with Spike Lee’s stylistically bombastic colours, compositions, and hip-hop rhythms, but in the extremity of such expressions it effectively becomes part of the fiery clash between righteous anger and profound joy, both of which burn vividly in this Brooklyn community, defining the lives of its rich, eclectic characters.
