The Ghost Writer’s pessimistic, circular plotting makes a smooth leap from page to screen in this taut political thriller, as Roman Polanski infuses it with a wholly cinematic atmosphere of phantasmal dread that builds his nameless protagonist on a foundation of obscured identities, as well as a chilling mystery leading him into the mouth of the malevolent forces he is investigating.
The characters of Incendies contain remarkable and shocking depths, hidden not just to others but to themselves as well, and the process of uncovering these by tracing the footsteps of family history through the Middle East makes for a disturbingly revelatory journey delivered with a deft hand by Denis Villeneuve.
Abbas Kiarostami’s sleight of hand in Certified Copy is tremendously subtle, quietly swapping out key details of two strangers’ friendly, sparring relationship until they become something else entirely, and confounding us with a metaphysical shift in reality that ponders how authenticity can be drawn from emotional expressions and artefacts that aren’t truly original.
Christopher Nolan had already established himself as a master of experimental narrative form, but it wasn’t until he combined that with an epic, ambitious visual style in Inception that he became a generation-defining filmmaker.
