Whatever affection Kinds of Kindness promises to explore can only be considered ‘kindness’ on its most depraved level, yet it nevertheless becomes a common goal across its three surreal fables, as Yorgos Lanthimos’ characters wander an absurdist purgatory where dignity is commonly traded for the abusive love of employers, spouses, and religious leaders.
The outlandish matriarchal society that middle-aged philanderer Snàporaz traverses in City of Women is not quite a grand feminist statement, but rather a self-deprecating cinematic tool for Federico Fellini to pick at his own masculine insecurities, sprouting deliberations on gender and sexuality through a string of surreal, chaotic vignettes.
With Max Ophüls’ dextrous camera manoeuvring the ups and downs of Louise’s affair in The Earrings of Madame de…, it isn’t hard to fall prey to her idealistic belief in romantic destiny, imbuing her precious jewels that miraculously keep finding their way home with a mystical, auspicious significance.
There is a formal poetry to film trilogies which, when in the hands of an auteur, can reveal new dimensions to cinematic, narrative, and thematic interests not fully contained within their individual works. Not all of the trilogies listed here are consistently made up of great films, but they are worth documenting nonetheless.
Those 1960s greasers who live fast and die young may be immortalised in The Bikeriders, yet theirs is also a subculture visibly seeping away, as Jeff Nichols examines the inner workings of one Chicago motorcycle club with equal parts sensitivity, scepticism, and swagger.
Though based on the autobiography of the historical Venetian adventurer and his expansive voyage through 18th century Europe, Federico Fellini’s reimagining of Casanova’s life manifests with demented surrealism, trapping this lonely man in cycles of absurd carnal exploits fuelled by a profound, existential emptiness.
Dweeby college professor Gary relishes the challenge of posing as fake assassins for police sting operations in Hit Man, though beneath the darkly comic romance he strikes up with a client, Richard Linklater applies a macabre, psychoanalytic lens to false constructs of self-image and identity.
The year that passes over the course of Amarcord is not bound by straightforward plot convention, and yet each vignette takes its place in the whimsical portrait of 1930s Italy that Federico Fellini sentimentally models after his hometown, slipping into dreams of oppressive evils and boundless joys with careless, nostalgic abandon.
Michael Sarnoski’s reframing of A Quiet Place’s extra-terrestrial threat is conducted with impressive deftness in this prequel, developing an allegory for terminal illness that savours the joys of being alive, even as the series’ formulaic set pieces begin to grow thin.
Federico Fellini’s Roma is not quite the familiar city we recognise from history books, but rather an absurd, contradictory landscape of rich impressionistic detail, filtering its vibrant culture, art, and politics through vignettes distorted by the wily incongruity of satire and memory.
