Just as Hannah’s self-absorbed relatives take her bountiful generosity for granted, so too does Woody Allen relegate her own personal issues to the background of Hannah and Her Sisters, choosing instead to paint a thoughtful, funny portrait of dysfunctional family dynamics out of the narrowed perspectives of those who surround her.
Mountains May Depart marks Jia Zhangke’s most significant withdrawal from his distinctive, neorealist style, and although the film is a little weaker for it, he still finds a deep poignancy in the widening generation gap separating China’s past from its future.
Lynne Ramsay is far more interested in creating an impressionistic sense of a lonely, disorientated mind out of hypnotic montages than she is in plot in You Were Never Really Here, building ambient rhythms that draw us into the fragmented nightmares of a violent man tasked with rescuing young girls from traffickers.
Even while considering the wretched corners of the human psyche that Alfred Hitchcock has probed all through his career, perhaps the intensive character study of Shadow of a Doubt is his most disturbing, as he paints a twisted portrait of two Charlies, uncle and niece, locked in a deadly secret seeping with subtext of incest, grooming, and sexual abuse.
Steven Spielberg’s broad, sweeping style of iconographic filmmaking is well-suited to such classical Shakespearean stories as that which West Side Story takes its own spin on, as in this vibrantly artistic adaptation New York becomes a dystopian wasteland of gangs and hopelessly star-crossed lovers.
Woody Allen takes aim at 19th century Russian literature in his off-beat period piece Love and Death, smashing through those quaint conventions of cultural and cinematic history to fashion an entirely new kind of artistic statement out of the fragments left behind.
The Purple Rose of Cairo is just as much an ode to the world of movies as it is a fable warning against the temptation to use them as a replacement for living, though it is through Woody Allen’s intelligent, enthusiastic screenplay and one of Mia Farrow’s most touchingly sweet performances that it beautifully transcends its simple yet imaginative premise.
The psychological drama that Maggie Gyllenhaal unravels in her directorial debut The Lost Daughter has no inhibitions in peeling back the sensitive and thorny layers of motherhood, crafting an uneasy atmosphere of paranoia that consumes the mind of two troubled women torn between their families and the allure of freedom.
Tick, Tick… Boom! seeps with a zest for life shared by both director Lin-Manuel Miranda and his subject of fascination, musical theatre writer Jonathan Larson, openly embracing notions of bohemia and self-aware numbers in a deconstruction of artistic ambitions, obsessions, and egos.
It might be a little generous calling House of Gucci “Shakespearean”, but Ridley Scott’s decades of experience working with classical narratives and archetypes effectively turns this complicated piece of recent history into an epic tragedy of grand destinies and fallen empires.
