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.
Such is Kathryn Bigelow’s fine control over action-driven sequences that even as Zero Dark Thirty delivers on its raw thrills, she also manages to coordinate them remarkably tightly in her narrative’s driving pursuit of justice, following the CIA’s lengthy hunt for Osama Bin Laden over ten gruelling years.
As an ensemble of men track down the body of a murder victim through the Turkish countryside, Nuri Bilge Ceylan languidly pulls together the stories of a suspect, a prosecutor, and a doctor in a meditation on generational sin and regret, using his archetypal characters and symbols to develop Once Upon a Time in Anatolia into a delicately existential fable.
All it took was a filmmaker with as intense a fascination in humanity’s primal fears and desires as David Cronenberg to craft such a thrilling drama out of founding psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s contentious relationship, as A Dangerous Method compellingly turns these reserved historical figures into vulnerable subjects of its own psychological studies.
There is a quiet frustration in seeing haughty intellectual Anthony emotionally manipulate ambitious film student Julie in The Souvenir, and although it is clear which one Joanna Hogg holds more affection towards, her autobiographical self-reflection on toxic young love takes a touchingly nuanced understanding of the matter in its gentle pacing and affecting character work.
The three days we spend within freshman Jake’s microcosmic college bubble seems to stretch out in eternal bliss, a period which Richard Linklater delights in with richly defined characters lightly treading the line between hedonism and intellectualism, evolving Everybody Wants Some!! into an unhurried study of Generation X masculinity in all its youthful idealism.
The painter’s perspective that Céline Sciamma offers us in Portrait of a Lady on Fire uses its delicate renderings of seaside cliffs and eighteenth-century French manors as the setting for a gorgeous romance between an artist and her reluctant subject, powerfully intertwining their passions with classical archetypes vividly rooted in ancient Greek mythology.
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.
Mountains May Depart marks Jia Zhangke’s most significant withdrawal from his distinctive, neorealist style, and although the film is a little weaker for it, he still finds a deep poignancy in the widening generation gap separating China’s past from its future.
Lynne Ramsay is far more interested in creating an impressionistic sense of a lonely, disorientated mind out of hypnotic montages than she is in plot in You Were Never Really Here, building ambient rhythms that draw us into the fragmented nightmares of a violent man tasked with rescuing young girls from traffickers.
