Never has Park Chan-wook wielded his fatalistic irony with such a darkly comedic edge as he does in No Other Choice, sending one unemployed paper specialist on a murderous trail against rival job candidates, and sharply exposing the bureaucratic nihilism of modern capitalism.
If Yasujirō Ozu’s filmography is a cinematic suite charting the tension between tradition and progress, then An Autumn Afternoon stands as a tender final movement, tracing a widowed father’s reluctant push to marry off his daughter amid Japan’s mid-century commercialism.
When a pair of conspiracy theorists kidnap a CEO they believe is an alien, neither zealots nor capitalists can escape the misanthropic aspersions of Lanthimos’ cosmic joke, as Bugonia spirals into an absurdist satire of power, paranoia, and humanity’s self-inflicted ruin.
Yasujirō Ozu offers nothing but sympathy for one helpless mother’s agonising moral compromise in A Hen in the Wind, imposing the harsh, destitute architecture of postwar Japan upon her shame, as well as her desperate attempt to seek marital reconciliation.
Chaos is simply not part of Yasujirō Ozu’s meditative cinematic language, and There Was a Father especially asserts his proclivity for ritualistic repetition in smoothing over emotional disruptions, recognising the remarkable legacy of one former teacher whose soul is deeply etched with tragedy, grief, and guilt.
The Tokyo that Ryōsuke moves to in The Only Son is not the bustling city of opportunity he once dreamed of, but a desolate wasteland of factories and smokestacks, underscoring Yasujirō Ozu’s tale of parental expectations and disappointments with the social realities of Depression-era Japan.
The contempt that travelling actors hold for themselves in A Story of Floating Weeds may be extreme, yet the petty drama they vindictively stoke only further condemns them to sorrowful lives, as Yasujirō Ozu examines their thorny relationships with both compassion and cynicism.
The rule of law is little more than an arbitrary imposition of authority in Zero for Conduct, and it is up to the roguish schoolboys of one French boarding school to restore the natural order, as Jean Vigo playfully mounts a rising disenchantment towards anarchic revolution.
Amid The Phoenician Scheme’s epic entanglements of assassins, terrorists, and bureaucrats, it is within a dysfunctional family reunion where Wes Anderson unravels an unlikely spiritual redemption, mending broken bonds through one wealthy industrialist’s mission to execute his most ambitious project yet.
Perhaps the only thing longer than the title Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the film itself, as Chantal Akerman forces us to feel every passing minute of one homemaker’s fastidious routine, along with its gradual, psychological decay into exasperating chaos.
