Within The Woman King’s historical setting of 19th century West Africa, the familial bonds built between the Dahomey tribe’s warrior women feel viscerally alive, as Gina Prince-Bythewood brings both a feminist sensitivity and tactile practicality to sweeping battle set pieces that revel in the awe of its fierce female fighters and leaders.
The thrill of seeing three tangential storylines wind around one unassuming house and its chilling, subterranean dungeons in Barbarian makes for a truly shocking piece of horror cinema, as through Zach Cregger’s agile, perspective-shifting narrative we learn to discern which monsters hiding in its depths deserve either our utmost disdain or sorrowful pity.
There is certainly madness to David O. Russell’s elaborate plotting of conspiracies and murders throughout Amsterdam, but with his intimately framed close-ups and stylish rendering of 1930s New York, he builds a humorously sweet affection between the main trio of accidental detectives that outlasts any vicious political manoeuvring surrounding them.
Accusations of abhorrent crudity may be fairly lobbed at the subject matter of Blonde, but certainly not at Andrew Dominik’s talents as a provocative, implicating filmmaker, solemnly studying Norma Jean and Marilyn Monroe as dual identities in perpetual conflict, and disturbingly manifesting their world as a surreal, existential nightmare psychologically fusing them together.
Bodies Bodies Bodies delivers a perverse thrill in seeing its ensemble of cynical, two-faced narcissists tear themselves down over the course of one bloody, wild party, as Helina Reijn offers the darkly comedic, neon-tinted murder mystery a Gen Z twist, exposing the fraught insecurities and secrets that lie beneath their insincerity.
There is no need to complicate the simple concept of an extra-terrestrial hunting humans for sport, as Dan Trachtenberg smartly chooses to build Prey on the primal relationship between a hunter and its quarry, offering an assorted blend of genres that creatively brings the Predator franchise’s sci-fi conventions to one Comanche village and its scenic surrounding territory in the 18th century.
The awareness of storytelling conventions that one lonely scholar brings to her meeting with a Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing offers George Miller’s self-conscious metanarrative great passion for its artistic traditions, crafting an uneven yet vivid collage of fairy tale motifs greater than the sum of its mythological fragments.
There may be some rustiness on David Cronenberg’s part in returning to body horror filmmaking after two decades, but his blend of film noir and science-fiction in Crimes of the Future nevertheless makes for an intriguingly grim contemplation of bodily autonomy, artificial evolution, and artistic expression, seeking to reveal the primal anarchy in humanity’s raw, physical existence.
Steven Soderbergh updates classic thriller conventions with pandemic-related concerns in Kimi, using its vigorous camerawork and tightly wound plotting to deliver a gripping take on cyber-age insecurities, twisting our most personal social anxieties into a cynical vision of a tech-driven society where privacy is void and the most frightening prospect of all is simply leaving one’s home.
Armed with a sharp wit and a penchant for intelligent subtext, Jordan Peele goes about examining the thread connecting humanity’s hunger for spectacle and its arrogant domination of nature in Nope, confronting us with a cosmic horror that lives in the sky above one ranch of Hollywood animal trainers.
