With much of Hollywood recently taking to the feel-good stories of successful entrepreneurs, the unlikely pairing of a naïve tech bro and cutthroat businessman in BlackBerry proves to be a satirically wry subversion of that formula, taking us behind the scenes of the most catastrophic business failure of the 21st century with a sharply cynical wit and natural spontaneity.
Soaring mountaintops and deep oceans become fitting metaphors for the dangerous longing between detective and suspect in Decision to Leave, as Park Chan-wook follows this obsession with a keen, stylistic precision and melancholic ambiguity that threatens to topple both in their pursuit of love.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 proves there is still life to be found in Tom Cruise’s perilous undertakings seven films deep into the franchise, creatively playing on renewed fears of an artificial intelligence takeover with its intangible villain, and setting the stage for a series of thrillingly practical set pieces.
In Asteroid City’s grand metaphor for life, everyone is performing roles that they may not fully understand, yet through the metatextual union of art and reality Wes Anderson reverberates a sweet, formal harmony across a youth astronomy convention visited by aliens, and the backstage drama of the play it exists within.
The mysterious, embalmed hand that invites deceased spirits into the minds of teenagers makes for a dangerous party drug in Talk to Me, as well as a terrifying metaphor that the Philippou brothers tease out with an uneasy subjectivity, haunting those who can’t seem to tear themselves away from its supernatural intoxication.
Just as the tiniest of quantum processes may produce explosive reactions, so too does the father of the atomic bomb set off seismic ripples across human history in Oppenheimer, and from beneath his shadow Christopher Nolan whisks us forward through a relentlessly non-linear narrative to witness the tortured Destroyer of Worlds emerge out the other end.
Armed with self-aware humour and a kitschy production design, Greta Gerwig delivers a camp visual treat in Barbie, balancing a feminist interrogation of the doll’s controversial place in pop culture against the innocent, whimsical joy of everything it was intended to represent.
As the mystical powers of one mute Indigenous Australian boy begin to emerge within a 1940s Catholic orphanage in The New Boy, Warwick Thornton delicately weaves a magical realist allegory of spirituality, assimilation, and colonialism’s stranglehold on ancient cultures, set against the backdrop of the beautifully unfathomable outback.
Even as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hurtles through universes of conflicting pop art aesthetics, the archetypal hero conventions it deconstructs binds them together within a set ‘canon’, all the while pushing against such restrictive notions of fate with a meta-modernist humour and hyper-kinetic animation.
As far as storytelling in the MCU goes, the creative tonal balance and cartoonish playfulness of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 makes for a terrific send-off to the franchise’s most colourfully eccentric series, as James Gunn faces his oddball characters up against painfully tragic pasts.
