Through its epic scale and high-wire, multilinear structure, Magnolia binds its sprawling ensemble of characters under a series of escalating coincidences, marking a great formal achievement in metaphysical filmmaking for a 28-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson.
Martin Campbell’s masterfully efficient set pieces paired with Daniel Craig’s complex performance of a man fighting with his ego thrillingly rejuvenates this classic archetype of British film, and together hold Casino Royale up as a remarkable piece of character-driven, action cinema.
In turning his provocative, neon-tinted stylings to Hollywood’s cutthroat fashion industry in The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn quite literally puts his cast of models and actors under the knife, carving out a hellish underworld of cannibalistic cultism kept hidden behind a façade of attractiveness.
As Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings progresses deeper into its world of covert organisations and mystical Chinese villages, director Destin Daniel Cretton gradually turns up the elegant beauty of his landscapes and martial arts choreography, using both to bring an evocative sensuality to our hero’s journey of self-discovery.
Without a voice to bridge the gap between her mind and the exterior world, it is instead Ada’s music which becomes her purest form of communication in The Piano, carrying a rich, full-bodied expression of the Scotswoman’s restless soul through the beaches, forests, and colonies of 19th century New Zealand.
Though we can appreciate the immediate impact of Jia Zhangke’s stark, minimalistic aesthetics in painting out a social landscape in decline, the formally ambitious construction of China over a ten-year span reveals an accumulation of small changes set in motion by an increasingly globalising culture, slowly eroding the value of art, tradition, and relationships.
When a sheep gives birth to a semi-horrific, semi-adorable creature on a lonely couple’s rural Icelandic farm, Lamb takes a small step away from the horror genre, and more into that of a psychological family drama, probing questions of how parenting instincts overlap with the welfare of such a unique, irreconcilably “different” child.
The blend of dry English humour and the brazen smarminess of American comedy in A Fish Called Wanda makes for a delicious mix of character dynamics, setting up the patriotic egos of both countries and then knocking them down a few pegs purely through their hilarious, bitter, and petty distaste for each other.
The greed of men has often been a preoccupation of John Huston throughout his career, but never has expanded it to the spectacular, godlike proportions we witness here in The Man Who Would Be King, which sets a rollicking adventure against an epic historical backdrop of nationalistic British imperialism.
A great achievement in screenwriting for Lawrence Kasdan, The Big Chill is his comical but touching ode to the lost idealism of the Baby Boomers living in Reagan’s America.
