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.
Count Orlok’s carnal voraciousness is more heightened than ever in Robert Eggers’ meticulously handsome remake of Nosferatu, underscoring the shameful, psychosexual desire which exposes each character to the vampire’s disturbing pull, and manifesting an archaic horror that feeds on our guilty hearts.
John Ford’s sentimental mythologising cannot be criticised for a lack of rousing sincerity in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, commemorating the dutiful perseverance of one Old West cavalry troop seeking peaceful resolution to a historic conflict, and basking in the vibrant majesty of the rugged American wilderness.
Roberto Rossellini’s casting of one trouble marriage against the crumbling, historical ruins of Naples reveals rocky foundations in Journey to Italy, deeply pondering how we let our mortality define our relationships, and the existential loneliness which organically emerges from them.
The anonymous affair which widower Paul and young actress Jeanne conduct makes for a warped power dynamic in Last Tango in Paris, and Bernardo Bertolucci is unafraid to plunge the crude depths of their precarious arrangement, prodding at raw, psychological wounds that explode with love, grief, and violent anger.
By casting himself as the omniscient narrator of Two English Girls, François Truffaut imbues the love triangle between one aspiring Parisian writer and the two sisters he deeply loves with a tender, literary quality, playfully savouring every romantic and sexual encounter over nine years of their young lives.
Alexander Nevsky may not possess the formal innovation of Sergei Eisenstein’s avant-garde silent films, yet this venture into sound cinema unfolds a historic clash of medieval armies with incredible finesse, celebrating a Russian folk hero whose tale resonates across eras and cultures.
Rarely has history been instilled with as much lively effervescence as it is in October: Ten Days That Shook the World, as Sergei Eisenstein immortalises that jolt of radical exhilaration once felt in the Russian Revolution through the eloquent arrangement of visual symbols, using statues, weapons, and religious icons to recount this tale of Bolshevik victory.
It is virtually impossible to separate Sergio Leone’s majestic cinematic style, mythic storytelling, and morally ambiguous characters in For a Few Dollars More, as each tightly intertwine the paths of two gunslingers competing for a bounty, yet choosing to wield their own darkness against far more rotten evils.
Sergio Leone’s orchestration of every cinematic element at his disposal in A Fistful of Dollars makes for an operatic shake-up of the Western genre, landing a mysterious gunslinger in a town divided by two rival families, and drenching America’s revered mythology in blood, sweat, and violent anarchy.
