There seems to be a sinister influence taking hold of the children that governess Miss Giddens is tasked with caring for in The Innocents, though as Jack Clayton sinks us into her tortured, repressed mind, so too are the lines blurred between unholy evil and those who obsessively seek to conquer it.
Featuring a vast array of natural locations and rich characters, Kevin Costner announces a project so majestically bloated in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 that it threatens to dilute its own focus, yet which still etches out a sprawling, Western mythology refusing to be defined by a single perspective.
Through an attempted escape from corporate servitude and an unnatural distortion of biology, Alien: Romulus disturbingly examines the treacherous magnitude of human ambition, as well as the inhumanity which ironically threatens to cannibalise us in the process.
Michelangelo Antonioni sweeps us away by the tantalising prospect of conspiracy when fashion photographer Thomas accidentally captures a murder in Blow-Up, demonstrating the powerful tool of perception that is an artist’s eye, yet also questioning whether such intensive scrutiny may lead to elusive distortions of reality.
Through the violent hurricanes which ravage the Texan wastelands in The Wind, Victor Sjöström delivers a haunting metaphor for life’s mercurial turbulence, plunging one helpless ingénue into a howling, elemental chaos which harshly erodes our sanity.
The anonymous affair which widower Paul and young actress Jeanne conduct makes for a warped power dynamic in Last Tango in Paris, and Bernardo Bertolucci is unafraid to plunge the crude depths of their precarious arrangement, prodding at raw, psychological wounds that explode with love, grief, and violent anger.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s dynamic camerawork does not spare us from the anguish of a nation subjected to unfathomable trauma in The Cranes Are Flying, distilled within one young woman who achingly perseveres through the grief, guilt, and loneliness of seeing loved ones fall to the carnage of war.
The splendid combination of musical and cinematic talents behind Wicked effectively claims its iconic cultural status within cinema as well as theatre, expanding this whimsical fable of friendship and prejudice to elaborate, epic proportions fitting of its grand narrative stakes.
Stealing a dead man’s identity seems like the perfect opportunity for television journalist David Locke to escape his unfulfilling life in The Passenger, though as Michelangelo Antonioni drifts him through a perplexing labyrinth of his own making, we are implicated in his confrontation with life’s empty, senseless banality.
Smile 2 does not quite diverge from its predecessor’s steady, downward slide into tortured psychosis, and yet Parker Finn’s cinematic ambition has nevertheless grown with this horror sequel, pushing his demonic metaphor for deep-seated trauma into the world of celebrity, substance abuse, and self-image.
