There is great value in the parent-child relationship depicted in Petite Maman, but Céline Sciamma also recognises it does not need to be restricted to those rigid roles either, playing out a fantastical wish fulfilment of a young girl meeting her mother at the same age and together revelling in childhood, sharing the joys and pains that come with seeing one’s past and future.
As a grieving family ponders the recorded recollections of their broken robotic son in After Yang, Koganada forms a poignant commemoration of those complex lives that exist just beyond our periphery, studied and savoured through the refractive lens of memory where old ideas find new life in the present.
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.
Within this narrative of a small blackmail job wildly spinning out to a sprawling ensemble caper across 1950s Detroit, Steven Soderbergh’s off-kilter camerawork and sumptuously shady lighting gradually pulls us into a permanent stage of agitation, refusing to let us wander from the tight grip of No Sudden Move’s compelling mystery.
If its precursor was an examination of a young filmmaker’s first love, then Joanna Hogg counterpoints that in The Souvenir Part II with a thoughtful, autobiographical study of her first major loss, deconstructing the artistic and grieving processes with a keen meta-awareness and sharp compositional eye.
Where Ingmar Bergman saw severe austerity in the landscapes of Fårö, Mia Hansen-Løve discovers optimism and fantasy, and in weaving those tones deep into her layers of storytelling around a filmmaking couple coming to the island in search of inspiration, Bergman Island becomes an affecting examination of originality and influence in art.
Paolo Sorrentino weaves a light Christian mysticism into his autobiographical coming-of-age piece, The Hand of God, threading a theological sense of destiny and exquisite visual artistry through its narrative parallels of Italian folklore, sporting legends, and cinema culture.
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.
