The rich azure palette that pervades Three Colours: Blue in every shade imaginable beautifully sinks the film into a deep melancholy, as Krzysztof Kieslowski examines one young widow’s attempt to find emotional liberty from the ghosts of past traumas which continue to haunt her musically and psychologically.
My Night at Maud’s isn’t ready to deliver firm answers to its philosophical quandaries, and yet in this narrative built on a series of unlikely happenstances and cerebral discussions, Eric Rohmer also crafts an absorbing examination of fate, romance, and hypocritical egos as they fall under theological and secular perspectives.
With a playfully postmodern approach to classical conventions of both mise-en-scène and Greek mythology in Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard aims his incisive wit towards the gods of storytelling themselves, while critiquing those who degrade history with visions of crude, dishonest entertainment.
As an ensemble of men track down the body of a murder victim through the Turkish countryside, Nuri Bilge Ceylan languidly pulls together the stories of a suspect, a prosecutor, and a doctor in a meditation on generational sin and regret, using his archetypal characters and symbols to develop Once Upon a Time in Anatolia into a delicately existential fable.
Public Enemies may not be the intensive study of opposing equals that Michael Mann has so effortlessly pulled off before, but in his superb staging and epic set pieces based in Depression-era America, it nevertheless becomes a compelling examination of an unjust system slowly squeezing out one of its most vocal dissidents – real-life bank robber, John Dillinger.
In Denis Villeneuve’s tragic reconstruction of the 1989 Polytechnique Montreal massacre, he traps us inside a labyrinth of narrow corridors and bleak modernist architecture, following the immediate perspectives of two students whose fates will be forever intermingled with one violent, hateful man and his brief reign of terror.
There may not be a single Wes Anderson character more suited to his highly-curated affect than Max Fischer, as the slightly autobiographical characterisation of this ambitious school student imprints a comically organised style and structure upon Rushmore that matches the young filmmaker’s own idiosyncratic precision.
The mystical coincidences that bind French music teacher Véronique and Polish choir soprano Weronika together in a causal relationship are elusive in their formal complexities, as Krzysztof Kieslowski edges us towards an emotional understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness in The Double Life of Veronique without ever fully letting us in on its magnificently abstract secrets.
Even rarer than seeing a woman take the lead in a classical Western is the choice to set her against another woman as the equally compelling villain, as Nicholas Ray projects a feminine sensitivity upon the male-dominated genre in Johnny Guitar with magnificently complex characters and vibrant colourful expressions.
Escape From New York is a dystopian sci-fi, an action, but most of all it runs by the Western playbook, as John Carpenter sets up ex-soldier Snake Plissken as a swaggering hero tasked with rescuing the president from the giant prison that was once Manhattan Island, and setting its monstrous steel and concrete structures up as decrepit, urban labyrinth brimming with anarchy and chaos.
