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.
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.
