Even as Carl Theodor Dreyer holds the witch trials of one small Danish village in great contempt, Day of Wrath never truly rules out the question of whether some transcendent power is at play, sending the damned to early graves while the living stoke destructive flames of rumour and suspicion.
While the citizens of Tokyo spend their summer watching baseball games and visiting clubs in Stray Dog, police officer Murakami is set on apprehending the man in possession of his stolen gun, methodically closing the distance under Akira Kurosawa’s sharp, watchful gaze.
Through the convergence of three separate lives upon a single tragedy in 21 Grams, Alejandro Iñárritu gifts us a miraculous glimpse into the infinite, fragmented tapestry of human relationships, and the terrible burden this interconnectedness weighs on our souls.
Coming of age is quite literally a horror show in Carrie, and one that Brian de Palma conducts with spectacular tension, brewing a lethal combination of hormones, trauma, and telekinetic powers within a lonely, abused teenager.
The face of human evil is insidiously disguised in The Girl with the Needle, though Magnus van Horn’s monochrome cinematography offers a disturbing glimpse behind its warm, maternal mask, adapting a chilling piece of Danish history which once shook the post-war nation to its core.
Music is a supernatural force that can pierce the veil between life and death in Sinners, and it is through its bluesy harmonies that Ryan Coogler resonates a timeless riff between warring cultural ideals, setting one 1930s African American juke joint against an insidious band of vampires.
Within the spectacle, symbolism, and absurd formal patterns of Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers expose one aspiring screenwriter’s intellectual hypocrisy, trapping him in a hellishly elusive puzzle box beyond comprehension.
RaMell Ross’ avant-garde instincts come fully formed in the first-person camerawork and impressionistic montages of Nickel Boys, explicitly adopting the perspectives of two friends living in a 1960s reform school, and internalising a shared resilience that leads communities into the fight for civil rights.
As we traverse Brady Corbet’s epic saga of a Hungarian-Jewish architect forging a new life, his ties to both America and his homeland intertwine, yielding complex artistic fusions born of bitter nostalgia, soured dreams, and deep-seated cultural trauma.
The affliction which plagues one mild-mannered train driver with bouts of rage might as well be a blood curse in La Bete Humaine, and fate does not look kindly on those who tempt the beast, as Jean Renoir delicately lays out the blueprint of corrupted antiheroes and femme fatales in his tragic fable of man’s inner madness.
