William A. Wellman stages a textured web of strained family dynamics with incredible visual detail in Track of the Cat, offering an unassumingly spiritual consideration of colonial masculinity in its psychological western drama, and fastidiously binding it all together with a ravishing monochrome palette where spiteful sterility thrives.
Ingmar Bergman’s pensive journey of faith and doubt leads us through barren, plague-ridden landscapes in The Seventh Seal, imposing a stark beauty on his theological iconography and poetic contemplations which confirm this existential medieval fable as a historical feat of philosophical screenwriting.
The complex web of betrayals, seductions, and alliances within the aristocratic ensemble of Smiles of a Summer Night is tantalising to watch for its sharp class satire, and yet Ingmar Bergman also buries a profound wisdom into his intoxicating chaos, deepening its joyful wonder with blessings for new beginnings and second chances.
Living’s cultural transplant of Akira Kurosawa’s deeply contemplative Ikiru may struggle with originality at times, but in shifting this mid-century tale of one dying man’s enlightenment from Japan to London, Olivier Hermanus still summons a revitalised freshness, imbuing it with a whole new context of soul-sucking social customs and spiritual inspiration.
There is grace in the contemplation spurred on by the Bible’s parables, and through Au Hasard Balthazar’s elliptical, iconographic narrative, Robert Bresson conjures a similarly pensive meditation on suffering, adopting the perspective of a donkey being passed between multiple owners and its passive observations of humanity.
Ti West’s horror prequel Pearl is just as much a warped product of the classical Hollywood dream machine as the aspiring actress, murderess, and housewife at its centre, relishing the superficial splendour of lush Technicolor stylings that only barely conceals an uglier, malevolent truth.
Across three Kafkaesque fables set in the past, present, and apocalyptic future of a single residence, The House unfurls an allegory of whimsical existentialism, unnervingly studying humanity’s descent into material consumption, and delicately infusing its absurdism with the childlike innocence of stop-motion animation.
With his staggering aerial sequences and daring set pieces, William A. Wellman turns magnificent feats of engineering into vehicles for exhilarating storytelling in Wings, taking a birds-eye perspective of wartime conflicts and innovation that heightens both as displays of monumental human ambition.
Ti West doesn’t quite tread new ground in his grindhouse horror pastiche X, and yet he considers the religious puritanism and rebellious counterculture of 70s America with pulpy retrospection, examining the exploitation that runs deep in both and leaves older generations to wither away in violent, vengeful resentment.
Wes Anderson dedicates an enchanting piece of nostalgia to old-fashioned print journalists, Denis Villeneuve films an unfilmable science-fiction classic, and Jane Campion conducts a sensitive study of masculinity through the western genre.
