Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die presents us with an older, more mortal James Bond who is more likely to take risks out of selflessness than a reckless belief in his own invincibility, closing out an era of action cinema with a touch of poignancy that few action stars would be able imbue with as sincere a tenderness as Daniel Craig.
It was only a matter of time that Terence Davies would turn his sentimental fascination in the subjective, personal accounts of British history to an artist as culturally significant as Siegfried Sassoon, as here in Benediction he filters grim archival footage of World War I through the mind of a poet driven to eloquent expressions of anger, melancholy, and heartbreak.
One woman’s quest to determine the source of a mysterious sonic boom only she can hear is rendered through effervescent soundscapes and long, static shots in Memoria, as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic, magical realist style lifts us away from the progress and constructions of the material world and drops us into an enigmatic, serene sea of memory.
Casting aside those moments where Chloe Zhao gives up her artistic voice to the will of Marvel Studios, Eternals may be the franchise’s most narratively and stylistically ambitious film yet, constructing entire civilisations from the sorts of natural landscapes and golden hour lighting that the Oscar-winning director has well and truly mastered capturing.
Medieval English folklore finds fresh life in The Green Knight as David Lowery relishes the poetic fantasy and dreamlike imagery of this enchanting setting, and very gradually surrenders Sir Gawain’s mystical quest for glory to the creeping power of time, nature, and mortality.
Ridley Scott’s formally astounding interrogation of history as it is lived and perceived from moment to moment offers great understanding to those whose voices are lost to the past, all the while examining the inherent unreliability of any one account as the sole vessel of truth.
As Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings progresses deeper into its world of covert organisations and mystical Chinese villages, director Destin Daniel Cretton gradually turns up the elegant beauty of his landscapes and martial arts choreography, using both to bring an evocative sensuality to our hero’s journey of self-discovery.
When a sheep gives birth to a semi-horrific, semi-adorable creature on a lonely couple’s rural Icelandic farm, Lamb takes a small step away from the horror genre, and more into that of a psychological family drama, probing questions of how parenting instincts overlap with the welfare of such a unique, irreconcilably “different” child.
There is a glossy sheen to the bizarre, theatrical world that stand-up comedian Henry McHenry lives within, and yet by the end of Annette, Leos Carax raises the question of just how much its peculiar details are simply the warped perceptions of an egomaniac unable to confront a reality that doesn’t place him at its centre.
Barry Jenkins’ revision of the real “underground railroad” manifests as a retro-futuristic gift of modern-day resources to those who worked in secret to free slaves, dropping small, quiet doses of magical realism in among historical horrors.
