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.
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.
The constant struggle between one paroled prisoner’s moral compass and his desire to be seen as a moral person permeates A Hero with a provocative ethical ambiguity, and through Asghar Farhadi’s flair for searing realism and a wonderfully thorny screenplay, it sprouts a complex drama that sees a simple plan to regain honour veer off in unexpected directions.
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.
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.
