Don’t Look Up is sure to aggravate those who previously appreciated Adam McKay for his incisive political discernment, but the energetic storytelling and blunt, irreverent satire on display here is more an act of angry, hilarious, and provocative catharsis than anything else.
Though sin has implanted itself firmly in the soul of gambler William Tell, his attempts to soften its impact by putting up physical and emotional barriers between him and his environment points towards a deep complexity in his character, as Paul Schrader turns The Card Counter into a masterfully rigorous study of regret, self-discipline, and atonement.
In building out its characters in rich enough detail that both thrilling set pieces and quieter moments of drama are able to operate on equally gripping levels of tension, Squid Game forms a layered microcosm of cruel, barbaric capitalism in South Korea.
Within the mesmerising power plays between ranchers, mothers, and sons of The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion paints out duelling images of the Old West, neither of which clash in violent shootouts so much as they quietly manipulate each other according to their own visions of America’s future.
Never has Wes Anderson tied his ethos as a storyteller so closely to characters who similarly wish to offer a jaded world their fresh insights into its unique, distinctive beauty, as here in The French Dispatch he serves up an enchanting, episodic dedication to the passion and nostalgia of old-fashioned print journalists.
Denis Villeneuve succeeds in giving Frank Herbert’s epic space opera Dune the cinematic treatment on a grand scale, digging into its Greek mythological archetypes as a compelling canvas upon which he intricately paints out awe-inspiring civilisations, landscapes, and worlds of historic and futuristic significance.
With its protagonist’s intense attraction towards vehicles, string of cold-blooded murders, and fraudulent identity, Julia Ducournau’s Titane sketches out a disturbing portrait of a character as unpredictable as she is brutally misanthropic, preferring the cold sheen of metal over the soft touch of a human.
Blue Bayou features a heavy, gut-wrenching narrative that pulls a Korean-American adoptee down a bureaucratic path of loopholes towards unjust deportation, and yet the flashes of beauty which emerge in moments of serenity lend a quiet joy to his family ties that cannot be broken by time, distance, or institutional forces beyond his control.
It is through Edgar Wright’s disorientating atmosphere of intensely expressive neon washes and fluid transitions that we feel the physical worlds of aspiring fashioner designer Ellie break down in Last Night in Soho, as her nightmarish trips to the Swinging Sixties lead us into a frightening convergence of the past and present.
Though the baby mix-up premise of Parallel Mothers is in itself absurdly comical, humour is only one tool in Pedro Almodovar’s arsenal to draw out the melodramatic expressiveness of his characters’ rich, colourful lives, as he delivers a personal ode to all those wide-ranging, meaningful, and unpredictable experiences of motherhood.
