It is within Gravity’s restless, floating camera and moving allegory for grief that Alfonso Cuarón evolves it into a cinematic wonder, teasing out the compelling tension between barren emptiness and a determined embrace of life in one astronaut’s fraught journey back to Earth from the merciless void of outer space.
Like a folk ballad that keeps returning to the same chorus, Inside Llewyn Davis moves in destitute cycles, as its titular character endlessly searches for musical success and self-sabotages relationships, forming the nomadic foundation of the Coen Brothers’ beautifully tactile portrait of adversity.
Wong Kar-wai has rarely indulged so much in the fierceness of action cinema as he does here in the story of legendary martial artist Ip Man, and yet the delicate attention to detail in his slow-motion cinematography and elegant choreography also ties The Grandmaster to the lyrical style that he has spent decades honing with such precision.
Four loosely connected episodes of violence based on real Chinese news stories come together in a Touch of Sin to sketch out a landscape of anger and frustration, as Jia Zhangke pushes the boundaries of his usual neo-realistic style until they start to overlap with traditional crime thriller conventions.
