Michael Haneke continues his use of unsettling, open-ended mysteries to provoke an unresolved frustration in The White Ribbon, leading us to uncover the source of evil in a small German village on the precipice of World War I through a string of obscure accidents.
The raw grit of Ken Loach’s 1960s South Yorkshire working class community bleeds through his dedication to cinematic realism in Kes, its soul-sucking structures of school and labour sapping the youthful idealism of one disillusioned teenage boy, and setting up his falcon as the sole symbol of independent freedom in this painfully oppressive world.
Dune looks set to sweep the technical categories and The Power of the Dog has its eyes on Best Picture for the 94th Academy Awards, but a late surge in popularity behind CODA is keeping things nail-bitingly unpredictable.
For all its authentic grounding in the culture of 1980s Poland, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog remains a mystical piece of theological cinema for its complex examination of the Ten Commandments in a series of contemporary moral fables, collectively provoking deep contemplation through an omniscient perspective akin to that of an all-seeing God.
Within this narrative of a small blackmail job wildly spinning out to a sprawling ensemble caper across 1950s Detroit, Steven Soderbergh’s off-kilter camerawork and sumptuously shady lighting gradually pulls us into a permanent stage of agitation, refusing to let us wander from the tight grip of No Sudden Move’s compelling mystery.
The Hitchcockian setup of an obsessive voyeur with a telescope in A Short Film About Love is very familiar, but in place of a suspenseful mystery Krzysztof Kieslowski instead absorbs us in a compelling morality play concerning two opposed yet twisted perceptions of love – the romanticisation of one-sided affection, and the complete denial of its existence.
Marriage is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all package, as Buster Keaton so amusingly illustrates in his silent short One Week, demonstrating a level of comedic genius in his architectural inventiveness, creative framing, and wildly physical stunt work that explores the unique cinematic potential of visual comedy in the early days of film.
The vision of Warsaw that Krzysztof Kieslowski presents in A Short Film About Killing is a barren wasteland of mud and shadows, strained through a sickly, jaundiced filter that unnervingly reveals the truly grotesque horror in justifying the malevolent destruction of human life.
If its precursor was an examination of a young filmmaker’s first love, then Joanna Hogg counterpoints that in The Souvenir Part II with a thoughtful, autobiographical study of her first major loss, deconstructing the artistic and grieving processes with a keen meta-awareness and sharp compositional eye.
There is a quiet frustration in seeing haughty intellectual Anthony emotionally manipulate ambitious film student Julie in The Souvenir, and although it is clear which one Joanna Hogg holds more affection towards, her autobiographical self-reflection on toxic young love takes a touchingly nuanced understanding of the matter in its gentle pacing and affecting character work.
