The perpetual misfortunes that plague one Jewish professor in A Serious Man often seem like the setup for a joke with no punchline, damning him to an ungratifying search for life’s answers through both science and faith, and thereby delivering one of the Coen Brothers’ most enigmatic, ironic works.
Avatar may not be James Cameron’s most consistently flawless work, but it is certainly at least his most purely ambitious, using innovative digital technology to serve his incredible visual artistry and immersive worldbuilding, both of which place this rich, ecological allegory among the most monumental achievements of genre filmmaking.
Though the title I Killed My Mother explicitly refers to Hubert’s lie that his titular parent is dead, it also becomes apparent that this is something she painfully experiences every single day, revealing a remarkably mature voice in 19-year-old director Xavier Dolan who radiates these complex character dynamics out into a neatly composed visual style and rhythmic formal structure.
Public Enemies may not be the intensive study of opposing equals that Michael Mann has so effortlessly pulled off before, but in his superb staging and epic set pieces based in Depression-era America, it nevertheless becomes a compelling examination of an unjust system slowly squeezing out one of its most vocal dissidents – real-life bank robber, John Dillinger.
In Denis Villeneuve’s tragic reconstruction of the 1989 Polytechnique Montreal massacre, he traps us inside a labyrinth of narrow corridors and bleak modernist architecture, following the immediate perspectives of two students whose fates will be forever intermingled with one violent, hateful man and his brief reign of terror.
Michael Haneke continues his use of unsettling, open-ended mysteries to provoke an unresolved frustration in The White Ribbon, leading us to uncover the source of evil in a small German village on the precipice of World War I through a string of obscure accidents.
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.
