Denis Villeneuve succeeds in giving Frank Herbert’s epic space opera Dune the cinematic treatment on a grand scale, digging into its Greek mythological archetypes as a compelling canvas upon which he intricately paints out awe-inspiring civilisations, landscapes, and worlds of historic and futuristic significance.
With its protagonist’s intense attraction towards vehicles, string of cold-blooded murders, and fraudulent identity, Julia Ducournau’s Titane sketches out a disturbing portrait of a character as unpredictable as she is brutally misanthropic, preferring the cold sheen of metal over the soft touch of a human.
Blue Bayou features a heavy, gut-wrenching narrative that pulls a Korean-American adoptee down a bureaucratic path of loopholes towards unjust deportation, and yet the flashes of beauty which emerge in moments of serenity lend a quiet joy to his family ties that cannot be broken by time, distance, or institutional forces beyond his control.
It is through Edgar Wright’s disorientating atmosphere of intensely expressive neon washes and fluid transitions that we feel the physical worlds of aspiring fashioner designer Ellie break down in Last Night in Soho, as her nightmarish trips to the Swinging Sixties lead us into a frightening convergence of the past and present.
Though the baby mix-up premise of Parallel Mothers is in itself absurdly comical, humour is only one tool in Pedro Almodovar’s arsenal to draw out the melodramatic expressiveness of his characters’ rich, colourful lives, as he delivers a personal ode to all those wide-ranging, meaningful, and unpredictable experiences of motherhood.
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die presents us with an older, more mortal James Bond who is more likely to take risks out of selflessness than a reckless belief in his own invincibility, closing out an era of action cinema with a touch of poignancy that few action stars would be able imbue with as sincere a tenderness as Daniel Craig.
It was only a matter of time that Terence Davies would turn his sentimental fascination in the subjective, personal accounts of British history to an artist as culturally significant as Siegfried Sassoon, as here in Benediction he filters grim archival footage of World War I through the mind of a poet driven to eloquent expressions of anger, melancholy, and heartbreak.
One woman’s quest to determine the source of a mysterious sonic boom only she can hear is rendered through effervescent soundscapes and long, static shots in Memoria, as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic, magical realist style lifts us away from the progress and constructions of the material world and drops us into an enigmatic, serene sea of memory.
Casting aside those moments where Chloe Zhao gives up her artistic voice to the will of Marvel Studios, Eternals may be the franchise’s most narratively and stylistically ambitious film yet, constructing entire civilisations from the sorts of natural landscapes and golden hour lighting that the Oscar-winning director has well and truly mastered capturing.
Medieval English folklore finds fresh life in The Green Knight as David Lowery relishes the poetic fantasy and dreamlike imagery of this enchanting setting, and very gradually surrenders Sir Gawain’s mystical quest for glory to the creeping power of time, nature, and mortality.
