Jonathan Demme’s camera is a vehicle of pure empathy in Philadelphia, as it is through his consistent yet versatile close-ups that he pulls such raw anger, melancholy, and yearning from Tom Hanks’ emotive performance, opening us up to the complicated struggle behind one gay man’s fight for justice against his prejudiced former employers.
Though disappointingly bland from a visual standpoint, Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds the strength of his anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy on the fatalistic, formal connections between each self-contained chapter, offering up sincere meditations on our attempts to find happiness within a cruel, mischievous universe.
Though Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria does not fully bridge the connection between its chilling occultist horror and meandering political tangents, he still manages to leave a mark on the fable’s cinematic legacy with surreal, bone-crunching editing and a deep red colour palette, plunging us into the uneasy paranoia and bloodshed of 1970s Germany.
The surreal, sepia vision of Toronto that Denis Villeneuve shapes around his mysteriously linked doppelgängers in Enemy often feels as if it is ensnaring them in a paralysing spider web, psychologically binding them so tightly together through its cryptic motifs and obscure narrative that they might as well be two sides of one unfaithful, insecure man.
The grand long shots and rapid montage editing of Raoul Walsh’s boxing set pieces in Gentleman Jim are well matched to the agile fighting technique of its historical subject, James J. Corbett, using its action to lightly probe the brutish, primal nature of our sporting passions and the concerted efforts to reconcile those with our refined humanity.
Steve McQueen’s dip into the crime genre with Widows shrewdly carries on his style of uncompromising filmmaking, using dazzling camerawork and slick pacing to navigate a sprawling, rolling narrative which sees the consequences of one failed robbery ricochet through Chicago’s gangs, politics, and the grieving wives who soon decide to collaborate on their own grand heist.
Accusations of abhorrent crudity may be fairly lobbed at the subject matter of Blonde, but certainly not at Andrew Dominik’s talents as a provocative, implicating filmmaker, solemnly studying Norma Jean and Marilyn Monroe as dual identities in perpetual conflict, and disturbingly manifesting their world as a surreal, existential nightmare psychologically fusing them together.
As one widow wanders the gloomy remnants of her estranged husband’s derelict home in Vitalina Varela, Pedro Costa glacially slips through cinematic paintings of a decaying Portuguese village, dimly illuminating its weathered production through harsh vignettes of light that seek spiritual healing from grief, and which challenge us to peel back the layers of its solemn visual poetry.
The confrontation of one reformed outlaw with the shameful vestiges of his old life unfolds with a remarkably cynical disposition in Man of the West, as Anthony Mann’s widescreen, dusty landscapes and meticulous blocking presage the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone by several years, driving these brilliant character compositions with a sense of overbearing guilt and humiliation.
It is remarkable on its own that George Cukor united Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart in one film and captured such fine performances from each, though The Philadelphia Story is also even more delightful for its marvellously constructed web of romantic entanglements, which its lively screenplay and stars pick apart with insurmountable charm and a quietly savage wit.
