To be human in Pinocchio is to possess both free will and a conscience, and it is through its rich allegory of puppets and donkeys that Walt Disney imparts his dark, moralistic musings with dynamic visual expressions, crafting a staggering accomplishment in hand-drawn animation, each one tangibly alive in their tactile movements and wood-carved textures.
Bodies Bodies Bodies delivers a perverse thrill in seeing its ensemble of cynical, two-faced narcissists tear themselves down over the course of one bloody, wild party, as Helina Reijn offers the darkly comedic, neon-tinted murder mystery a Gen Z twist, exposing the fraught insecurities and secrets that lie beneath their insincerity.
There is no need to complicate the simple concept of an extra-terrestrial hunting humans for sport, as Dan Trachtenberg smartly chooses to build Prey on the primal relationship between a hunter and its quarry, offering an assorted blend of genres that creatively brings the Predator franchise’s sci-fi conventions to one Comanche village and its scenic surrounding territory in the 18th century.
Cinema Paradiso bleeds the sort of pure, unassuming love of film that greater movies may have tackled with more ambitious visual artistry, and yet Giuseppe Tornatore’s majestic coming-of-age fable nevertheless inspires a rousing sentimentalism which erodes all traces of cynicism in even the harshest critics.
It is within Gravity’s restless, floating camera and moving allegory for grief that Alfonso Cuarón evolves it into a cinematic wonder, teasing out the compelling tension between barren emptiness and a determined embrace of life in one astronaut’s fraught journey back to Earth from the merciless void of outer space.
The awareness of storytelling conventions that one lonely scholar brings to her meeting with a Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing offers George Miller’s self-conscious metanarrative great passion for its artistic traditions, crafting an uneven yet vivid collage of fairy tale motifs greater than the sum of its mythological fragments.
With its light romance and dark tragedy moving along inverse trajectories, the archetypal narrative of A Star is Born may be the closest thing Hollywood has to a modern fairy tale, and it is in the precise balance of both that George Cukor’s vibrant take on it stirringly paints out the brief life cycle of those talented individuals we happily turn into beautiful, disposable commodities.
Alcoholic writer Don Birnam may be totally infatuated with his vice, and yet the steady downward slide that Billy Wilder sets him on in The Lost Weekend sinks him deeper than he has ever been before, building out this compelling journey to rock bottom through intoxicating motifs and richly drawn characterisations that paint out an unsettling portrait of addiction at its most devastating.
For the bohemian misfits of Cabaret, it is easy enough to believe that the Kit Kat Club is a safe refuge to escape the angry politics of 1930s Germany, but as Bob Fosse skilfully intercuts its musical numbers with scenes of hope, love, and violence, we discover the chilling tension that exists between the dwindling escapism of one subculture and the burgeoning totalitarianism of another.
The rich duality of Trey Edward Shults’ compelling drama, narrative structure, and colour palettes bakes a symmetry deep into the formal construction of Waves, pivoting his rich portrait of one African-American family on a tragic turning point that divides their lives into two distinct periods of before and after, skilfully balancing out an oscillation between joyful heights and devastating lows.
