The black-market drug which reverts users to their younger selves is an appealing prospect in The Substance, though its side effects reveal a horrifying underside to such desires, seeing Coralie Fargeat compose a disturbing allegory for the physical deterioration of our ageing bodies and the destructive self-loathing which comes with it.
With a witty, grandiose screenplay and a camera that cleanly navigates political battlefields, Steven Spielberg uses the final months of Abraham Lincoln’s life to examine the messy game of American politics, carefully observing his tactical orchestration of congress to pass the slavery-ending 13th Amendment.
The coming-of-age vignettes that make up My Little Loves do not depict particularly momentous occasions, yet it is in the mundane minutia of Daniel’s year away from home that his self-discovery unfolds, as Jean Eustache tenderly captures the whiplash of a lonely, confusing, yet stimulating adolescence.
So tragically naïve is aspiring painter Maurice in La Chienne that Jean Renoir does not even let his demeaning fall from grace speak for itself, but rather frames this pitiful antihero as a mere puppet on life’s stage of poetic irony, weaving lyrical musings on romance and despair through his fated love triangle.
The assassination that will finally allow secret lovers Julien and Florence to elope couldn’t be more carefully planned, and yet the fatalistic pull of destiny has other mischievous intentions in Elevator to the Gallows, as Louis Malle intertwines two Parisian tales of love and crime with dark, seductive malice.
Contessa Livia Serpieri’s distaste for melodrama clearly does not extend to her own operatic romance in Senso, as Luchino Visconti stages her reckless affair against the tumultuous backdrop of 19th century Italy with historic grandeur, apprehensively waiting for these delusions of exotic love to unravel and expose the insecurities they conceal.
To truly revere a land as incomprehensibly vast and complex as Africa is to feed a connection to one’s own soul, and yet as Out of Africa absorbs us into Baroness Karen von Blixen’s bubble of romantic bliss, Sydney Pollack also develops a poignant metaphor that keeps her greatest love as distant as her nostalgic reminiscences.
Michael Mann’s grand mythologising of colonial America forecasts a solemn future in The Last of the Mohicans, and yet it is also through the cross-cultural relationships formed between Europeans and Native Americans that seeds of harmony are planted, miraculously blooming in the unfertile soil of war.
A return to the Mad Max series once again turbocharges George Miller with raw, high-octane vigour, as Furiosa expands its demented, post-apocalyptic wasteland to remarkably expansive proportions, and gives us even greater reason to admire its titular warrior as a force of undistilled willpower.
With an intelligent employment of religious and demonic imagery at hand, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina craft one of the most indelible cinematic characters of the 1950s, allowing us an empathetic vessel through which we contemplate the religious hypocrisies and class struggles of post-war Italy.
