With their veneers of whimsical innocence that mask quiet tragedies, it is clear through Wes Anderson’s adaptations of four short Roald Dahl stories that he sees parts of himself in the children’s writer, keeping his spirit alive with a curated, theatrical style that creatively reimagines fables of eccentric psychics, bullies, exterminators, and patients.
The Creator’s stimulating combination of grand theological questions and sci-fi action spectacle offers the genre fresh spiritual depth, using a futuristic conflict between humans and artificial intelligence as a messianic allegory of insecure gods, their tortured children, and the dehumanisation of enemies in wartime.
Ingmar Bergman’s contemplations of regret and old age in Saraband are far more grounded in his firsthand experiences than ever before, as his final film reunites the ex-lovers from Scenes from a Marriage to consider the echoes of family trauma throughout generations, and finds a soothing, spiritual peace in the act of reminiscence.
The stage is a place of deep meditation for theatre director Henrik in After the Rehearsal, letting memories of past and future relationships manifest with a subtle, time-shifting surrealism, and seeing Ingmar Bergman’s nostalgic humility take eloquent form as he looks back on his career.
It wouldn’t be hard to believe that each location in Duelle is interconnected within some giant, labyrinthine complex, entangling its mortal characters in a phantasmagorical web of manipulation set up by two warring goddesses, while Jacques Rivette’s obscure narrative uncovers the intransient magic simmering beneath the most ordinary corners of modern society.
While post-war Rome crumbles in Umberto D., Vittorio de Sica interrogates the isolating shame of poverty through the trials of one elderly pensioner, confronting the bleak realities of homelessness within an urban landscape of rich cultural history and cold, harsh discomfort.
The vivid imagination of Ingmar Bergman’s young protagonist in Fanny and Alexander is as enchanting as it is frighteningly dangerous, expressing itself through vibrantly festive mise-en-scène and impressionistic supernatural visions, and forming the basis of a deeply sentimental rumination on childhood wonder, trauma, and grief.
If there is anything that will save Buster Keaton’s stone-faced romantic from the violent family feud in Our Hospitality, then it is the amusing code of honour that ironically grants him sanctuary in the home of those who wish to kill him most, setting up a series of hilarious misadventures that erupt into bold, death-defying stunts.
Ingmar Bergman has long considered the fragile minds that lurk beneath mild personas, but From the Life of the Marionettes is easily his most violent rupturing of that veil, seeking whatever psychological reason lies at the source of one murderous outburst by piecing together fragments of the preceding and subsequent months.
As flamboyant detective Hercule Poirot is drawn into a murder mystery of mediums, seances, and vengeful ghosts in A Haunting in Venice, the foundations of his hardened logic are confronted with chilling visions of the impossible, effectively imbuing Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie with a Gothic horror that complicates our search for rational truth.
