In piecing together artefacts of Elvis Presley’s inspiration and influence littered throughout the past century, Luhrmann melds anachronistic music, wildly kinetic camerawork, and imaginative editing together into a vibrant collage of immense artistic passion, effectively adopting the rockstar’s own form of rebellious creative expression.
Alex Garland’s nightmarish journey through a troubled widow’s mind and her retreat to a town of identical strangers elusively edges towards a disturbing culmination of its lush stylistic flourishes and grotesquely absurd imagery, floating Men along the eerie rhythms that pass through spiritual and mythological iconography.
It is in the intersection of heartfelt drama and sharply edited, thrill-seeking aerial jet sequences that Top Gun: Maverick takes flight, resolving the lingering threads of guilt from the original film with a sensational, breathtaking vigour that Joseph Kosinski delights in driving towards its adrenalising conclusion.
Although Mimi Cave’s remarkable crafting of atmospheric tension through blood-red production design and relationship metaphors may exceed her ability to craft a wholly original story, that is all Fresh needs to pull us along in its tight, repulsive grip, where a young woman’s kidnapping at the hands of a charming, business-minded cannibal develops into a sinister, upside-down dating game.
The implicit promise made in the title Everything Everywhere All at Once is about as equally ambitious as it is precarious, setting up a maximalist piece of cinema that flits across alternate universes, wildly fires off montages, and deals in absurd, genre-blending humour, pondering the relative value of individuality within the grand scope of existence.
In the brutal, textured world that Robert Eggers builds around the Norse folktale of Viking prince Amleth, The Northman comes alive, approaching the detailed design of every crude wooden village and animal-skin costume with a visceral authenticity to deliver an awe-inspiring, sensory venture into the heart of obsessive vengeance.
For an idealistic filmmaker like Richard Linklater, the future has never looked brighter than it does in the hands of a child, and in blending the fantasy of a young boy becoming the first person to walk on the moon and the mundane details of life in 1960s Texas, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood effectively justifies humanity’s own naïve ambition and excitement.
It is in the dingy, yellow lighting and deliberately hazy camera focus of The Batman that Matt Reeves crafts an entirely new vision of Gotham City and its morally ambiguous vigilante, thoughtfully examining notions of vengeance as a corrupting force within the tight grip of its magnificently thrilling narrative.
