Category: Must-See

Tony Richardson | 2hr 1min

When Henry Fielding wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in 1749, he carved a powerful archetype out of its adolescent hero, leading him through worldly adventures that taught him lessons of moral integrity, courage, and independence. The transition from youth to maturity had been explored in the mythology of many ancient cultures before, but this was a coming-of-age story for a modern world, daring to treat its protagonist’s journey with a good dose of wit, irony, and moral complexity.

What Tony Richardson accomplished in his 1963 adaptation Tom Jones is more than just an update, though his version of the titular character is certainly far more an icon of the Swinging Sixties than the 18^th century, complete with the floppy hair and roguish charm of The Beatles. Richardson’s reinvention is imbued with the rebellious spirit of Tom Jones himself, throwing out the playbook of artistic convention to challenge the same conservative notions of young adulthood that Fielding had satirised over two hundred years prior.

As a landmark of the British New Wave, Tom Jones naturally carries the influence of its parallel French movement, and specifically the light formal experimentations of François Truffaut whose literary adaptations were similarly adventurous. Freeze frames, jump cuts, and fourth wall breaks constantly disrupt the narrative’s natural flow with comical disregard, and almost every scene transition is marked by an iris closing in on a face, a dissolve, or a wipe taking any number of shapes. Given the number of amateurs who have adopted these techniques in cheap editing programs, it is hard to argue that this has had a particularly positive influence overall, and as a result many have labelled Richardson’s editing as clumsy. Within the context of his caustic, irreverent satire though, these creative choices brilliantly undercut the pretentiousness of Tom Jones’ snobbish aristocratic society with amusing derision, reducing their self-important lives to colourful entertainment for the masses.

In fact, it isn’t hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick taking much of Richardson’s work here as his inspiration for Barry Lyndon twelve years later, subverting traditional notions of literary and historical study by underscoring the absolute absurdity of his characters. As if spoken by tedious college professors, the voiceovers of both films narrate their respective stories with haughty arrogance, weaving long-winded turns of phrase into their speech that make them targets of the viewer’s contempt. Especially in Tom Jones, our narrator humorously takes it on himself to decide which parts of the tale should be concealed from public view, as the camera gently drifts away from the beginning of a sex scene between Tom and Molly, a local peasant girl.

“It shall be our custom to leave such scenes where taste, decorum, and the censor dictate.”

Humans are inherently crude, messy creatures, so Richardson holds much criticism for those who try to apply a false filter of sophistication to modern understandings of their own species. This applies just as much to storytellers as it does to those characters arrogantly trying to write their own artificial legacies, many of whom happen to belong to society’s upper class. Tom is at least honest with his imperfections, while the noblemen who surround him ludicrously frame their vicious hunts for wild game and their vain gloating over dead carcasses as honourable sport. Richardson’s cinematography doesn’t touch the profound beauty of Barry Lyndon, but his active camera is fully engaged with the action as it races alongside their horses during the chase, unashamedly submitting to the thrill of their bloodthirsty conquest and carrying the energy of its vigorous editing. In calmer scenes, he mounts his period production design and blocking in handsome wide shots too, maintaining the same sophisticated, stuffy affect as his ensemble of pompous Englishmen.

Of all these characters, it is Mr. Blifil who is clearly the most contemptuous, asserting his noble heritage over his baseborn cousin Tom who was adopted by the kind-hearted Squire Allworthy. This villain represents everything distasteful about England’s aristocracy, pursuing Tom’s love interest Sophie with an air of vain entitlement, and later having him banished from the estate out of pure envy. This exile consequently becomes the catalyst for our hero’s journey of self-discovery, revealing his chivalry when he saves a woman being assaulted, and his recklessness when he is drawn too easily into physical confrontations. The fact that Richardson also dwells on the awkwardness of his romantic encounters between these major encounters is integral to this character study as well, watching him lustily biting into chicken to clumsily entice a woman who he later discovers may or may not be his birth mother, while she in turn seductively slurps up an oyster.

The question of Tom’s true parentage may hang heavy over the narrative, but in moments like these it is treated with as much irreverent humour as anything else. The possibility that he has committed incest makes for a shockingly amusing subplot, and the opening scene which sees him abandoned as a baby in Squire Allworthy’s quarters is especially whimsical, playing out in the farcically exaggerated fashion of a silent film. The traditionally baroque harpsichord is appropriated into an upbeat screwball score here while confusion hysterically runs riot through the squire’s estate, upending formal convention several years before Monty Python would do the same in their historical comedies. When the identity of Tom’s parents is finally revealed in Tom Jones’ final act, Richardson doesn’t waste time contemplating the laborious details of the tell-all letter either, but rather rushes through the exposition with a rapid-fire, fourth wall-breaking monologue that economically cuts straight to the point.

To Richardson, continuity is little more than a hindrance to his fusion of highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick. It is a tool for snobs, feebly demanding respect while inviting the playful mockery of others. The abundance of irony in Tom Jones is not to say that it lacks sincerity, as behind Albert Finney’s toothy grin and comic talents we still find a young man resolutely making his way through the world, though it is consistently his light-hearted nature which guides his moral character. Tom is no relic of the 18^th century or even the 1960s in Richardson’s hands, but an emblem of perennial youth, finding comfort in the frivolous joys and contrivances of an exceedingly absurd world.

Tom Jones is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to buy on Amazon.

Wim Wenders | 2hr 8min

The god’s-eye view of humanity that Wim Wenders grants us in Wings of Desire is refreshingly distant, flying high above the streets, flats, and offices of 1980s West Berlin, before swooping down to tune into the thoughts of its citizens. Like radio waves with a transmitter but no receiver, these streams-of-consciousness aimlessly echo out into chaotic universe. They appear frivolously trivial when taken on their own, and yet they serve an integral purpose in grasping humanity’s mosaic totality.

Still, it is not always fulfilling to be as omniscient as those two angels who up until now have embraced their God-given purpose to “Look, gather, testify, verify, preserve” those hidden thoughts that reveal our truest selves. Damiel and Cassiel are purely observers, standing atop buildings and statues with their white, feathery wings spread out behind them, and only ever interacting with mortals when one vaguely senses their spiritual presence. In these moments, fleeting eye contact is made with Wender’s invisible, floating camera, and some intangible expression of hope or wonder crosses their faces. For the angels though, this is the full extent of their correspondence, while Wenders renders more physical attempts at interacting through ghostly double exposures. “To watch is not to look from above, but at eye level,” Damiel contemplates, desperately longing to make the permanent journey from the heavens to a world where one can taste, feel, and love within the limitations of an earthly body.

Like The Wizard of Oz and Stalker before it, Wings of Desire employs a similar formal device of alternating between colour and monochrome cinematography as we switch from fantasy to reality, though perhaps Michael Powell’s deeply philosophical romance A Matter of Life and Death bears closer resemblance to Wender’s take here. From the angels’ foreign perspective, everything appears in an ethereal greyscale – certainly beautiful in its own right, yet failing to capture the broad spectrum of colours that can only be seen when grounded on Earth, where humans relish the subtle shades and hues which come with the knowledge of their eventual passing. Up close, these tiny joys are felt even more viscerally, but only when the melancholy transience of life has also been accepted.

The innocent hope that Wenders draws from these urban landscapes is shaped even further through the social and historical context embedded in virtually every shot as well, infusing his grainy location shooting with an air of poignant whimsy. Unknowingly set right before the fall of the Berlin Wall and bearing the leftover traumas of the Holocaust, Wings of Desire dwells in a space of bleak uncertainty between two world-changing events. Modernist architecture lines derelict streets, disused flats of churned-up mud stretch out for acres, and the Potsdamer Platz that one elderly man recalls from his youth is now spoiled by a graffitied section of the wall dividing Berlin, transforming this once-proud cultural icon of commerce into nothing more than a political partition.

In a brief The Tree of Life-style flashback too, Wenders continues to expand our view of this setting with the creation of its land, when “history had not yet begun.” A single, withered tree stands alone in a rippling lake, imprinting its black shape against a foggy backdrop with no visible horizon, and yet somehow from this total scarcity humanity incredibly evolves into advanced, intelligent lifeforms. The angels have been there since the start to witness it all, and more than anything else in the world, they are rightfully astonished by this incredible miracle of persevering life.

Today, these mortal beings are living testimonies to the city’s complicated past and present, despite very few of them explicitly reflecting on anything beyond the day-to-day minutia. Each one of these minor figures are integral to the silent cinema homage that Wenders is conducting here, building a character out of a metropolis as he thoughtfully calls back to those avant-garde city symphonies of the 1920s like Man With a Movie Camera, lyrically teasing out a visual and aural poetry for lengthy, plotless passages of time. The abstract rhythms of his long dissolves merge with an eerie, polyphonic choir here, running multiple vocal lines up against each other in discordant harmonies, and thereby mirroring the disjointed voiceovers that continue to murmur away in the background.

Like a disembodied spirit, Wenders circles his camera around the heads that project these thoughts outwards before latching onto another, while every so often an unusual exception stands out among the cacophony of whispers that sways these angels to try and forge a connection. Tragically, these attempts are too often in complete vain, as Cassiel’s affectionate contact with a suicidal man in one instance goes entirely unnoticed, leaving the angel deep in tormented grief as he helplessly watches the bearer of messy, jumbled feelings jump to his death.

“The sun in my back, on the left the star. That’s good: sun and a star. Her little feet. Hopping from one foot to the other. She danced so sweetly. We were all alone. Has she got my letter? I don’t want her to read it. Berlin means nothing to me… Havel? Is that a lake? Over there, wedding, or what? The East is everywhere, really. Strange people, they’re shouting. I don’t care. All these thoughts. I’d really rather not think any more. I’m going, why?”

Damiel’s eye is also caught by a disillusioned human who wishes to cast off ties to Earth and fly free, though in a very different manner. In a struggling circus, a French trapeze artist named Marion swings through the air wearing angel wings, and laments her loneliness in a foreign city. Emotionally, she lives in a space halfway between the worlds of humans and angels, unknowingly beckoning Damiel down from the sky as she privately reflects on the strange comfort she feels from some invisible companion.

“I know so little. Maybe because I am too curious. Often my thoughts are all wrong, because it’s like I’m talking to someone else at the same time.”

It is with this line that she turns to the camera and looks us right in the eye – not the first time a character has done this, but certainly the most intimate. Damiel feels truly seen, and that fondness that he previously felt for all humans begins to blossom into singular romantic attraction, directed towards a specific individual.

In a strangely funny diversion from these stories, Wenders spends some time following American actor Peter Falk as he shoots a film in Berlin, before revealing that he too was once an angel who ultimately gave up his wings to be human. Falk plays himself here, expressing an immense gratitude for his rebirth into a body that allows him to smoke, drink coffee, and create art. Wenders’ dedication at the end of the film briefly hints along these lines too, expressing gratitude for his three biggest directorial inspirations – Yasujirō Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky, who he thanks among “all the former angels.”

To humbly bring oneself down to the level of the lowest human and then share its joy through love or art is a truly noble calling, and one that Damiel embraces the moment he wakes up as a human when a slab of metal falls on his head. He bleeds profusely and feels great pain, yet he couldn’t be happier in this moment – any sort of sensation at all is proof of his regeneration into a mortal body, and he can’t help sharing his sudden ability to perceive colours with passing strangers. In essence, his newfound wonder is a tangible extension of the nostalgic poetry formally weaved into the film’s structure, each passage prefacing lyrical ruminations on childhood with the same six words.

“When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions: why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn’t before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?”

Cassiel is not wrong to feel that he has more to accomplish as an angel, thus choosing instead to remain behind, but of the two Damiel is clearly the one with the least regrets as begins his new life. When he finally approaches Marion, she once again looks straight at the camera, but this time Wenders’ colour photography captures the blazing red tones of her outfit, and the target of her gaze is fully visible. “I am together,” Damiel’s voiceover whispers as they kiss, uniting both the heavens and the Earth in a fleeting expression of devotion that stretches far beyond the transcendent, into the infinite.

Wings of Desire is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, can be rented or buy on Apple TV, or the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.

David Lean | 1hr 26min

The first time we encounter housewife Laura Jesson in the local railway tearoom of Brief Encounter, it is impossible to fathom the depths of her heartache. Her eyes are wide but uncfocused, concealing a complex mix of emotions from her endlessly chatty friend Dolly and the man sitting with them, Dr. Alec Harvey, who abruptly leaves to catch his train. The vague unease that hangs in the air cannot quite be pinpointed to any specific kind of sadness, though by the time the extended flashback which dominates most of the film leads us back to this moment, we are given the context to fully empathise with her. There wasn’t any way for us to know it before, but these are her last few minutes with the man she has secretly spent several weeks falling deeply in love with, and yet who can now only bid a final farewell with a discreet squeeze on her shoulder before disappearing forever.

In the absence of any giant romantic gesture or swooning kiss, this anticlimax brought about by Dolly’s unwelcome interruption is quietly shattering, forcing Laura to retreat into her mind and away from the onward march of an oblivious world. Time is a precious resource in Brief Encounter, particularly at the railway station where her and Alec’s schedules fleetingly align every Thursday where a giant clock imposes on their tiny figures, and through which the echoes of hours and minutes announce each new arrival.

In essence, this setting is an icon of persistent transience, bringing strangers together every day by a common need to travel before separating them the moment they board a train. The ticket inspector and tearoom owner whose small talk frequently diverts our attention perfectly typify this, teasing a potential romance which never has the time to grow into anything fruitful. Together, they also form a more innocent reflection of Laura and Alec’s covert affair, with all four love interests trying to explore relationships confined to a fleeting moment in time. The romance is intoxicating, but the demands of life never go away, consistently drawing Laura and Alec back to their families at home.

At least within her subjective recollections of the past, Laura is able to exert some control over the flow of time and carry pieces of it into the future. As she returns home and sits down with her husband Fred, she begins to confess her infidelity, though not aloud. Instead, her voiceover pours out what she might have said if the stability of their family unit wasn’t at stake. David Lean starts to leap back into the memories of her affair with Alec here, from their innocent first meeting in the tearoom, through their first kiss, and eventually to that final decision to part ways. Laura’s narration drips with sentimental lyricism, and yet equally infused with it is the heavy guilt that slowly erodes her dignity.

“It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading.”

Love and shame are closely intertwined here, both being deeply internal emotions that cannot be openly expressed to the world, and which thus lead to greater repression. Lean’s elegant camera movements and deep focus capture this tension with immense aesthetic beauty, especially drawing on the poetic realism of French auteurs Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne which inevitably leads such romances to tragically fated ends. Clouds of smoke and shadow obscure scenes of blooming passion at the railway station, while the whistle and rattling of passing trains intermittently drown out speech altogether, absorbing Laura into a dreamy reverie that offers an escape from ordinary life. When her relationship with Alex progresses to the point of meeting up elsewhere, lush gardens and babbling rivers begin to host their secret dates, calling back to the nostalgic vacation of A Day in the Country. Meanwhile, the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff delicately climb and descend scales in romantic accompaniment, though never quite losing track of the sorrow shared between these guilty lovers.

That this is the same director who would later craft some of Britain’s greatest historical epics in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia is somewhat surprising given the profound introspection of the piece, though if anything Lean is simply proving the versatility of his immense talent. His inspired development of characters may be the strongest similarity between these films, here seeing Laura shrivel into a guilt-ridden shadow of herself as she takes up smoking to calm her nerves, and quietly interprets an accident involving her son as the universe’s punishment.

Perhaps even stronger though are those moments which visualise Laura’s interiority, imagining an impossible future through double exposure effects which see her and Alec cruise, dance, and wander tropical beaches, and later hanging on her face as she tells Fred her first lie and ashamedly stares into a mirror. The deeper she sinks into her guilt, the darker Lean’s lighting becomes too, as a much greater deception further along sees her silhouetted at a payphone, with only the profile of her sweaty, anguished face vaguely illuminated.

Being shot right before the end of World War II in 1945, the hope for some restored order to the nuclear family unit looms large in Brief Encounter, and so there is no disagreement here between Laura and Alec when the shared guilt becomes insurmountable. A job opportunity for Alec in Johannesburg provides the perfect opportunity to make a clean break, but not before a quick journey back through all those locations that they had previously visited together.

For a short second after his train finally departs, a suicidal impulse crosses Laura’s mind. Lean’s camera tilts to the side in a dramatically canted angle as she rushes out to the platform, though panic quickly dissipates into mournful regret, and the rest of her life fades back into view. The dream ends, as does her internal confession, and although Fred has not heard a single word of it there is a quizzical look on his face. “You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me,” he gently acknowledges with absolute sincerity. Perhaps Laura will may never find the resolution she seeks with Alec, or the same excitement which lifted her out of the monotony of being a 1940s housewife. But if there is any solace to be found, then it is in the love that is still very much present in this modest home, never even requiring such complex sentiments to be spoken aloud in order to be mutually understood.

Brief Encounter is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be bought on Amazon.

David Fincher | 1hr 58min

Michael Fassbender’s dead-eyed assassin goes by no name other than that which is presented in the title of The Killer. He serves no god or country, and refuses to take sides in his clients’ affairs, instead dedicating his entire mind and body to the task at hand with extraordinary patience. “Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability,” his inner voice repeats, like a mantra of short, staccato instructions inducing a state of complete detachment. “Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. This is what it takes to succeed.”

Why then does The Killer see him tread the fine line between success and failure so frequently? It is a trend that begins to unravel right from the opening scene when, after spending days staking out a Parisian hotel room from an abandoned apartment across the street, he misses his target and hits an innocent woman instead.

The error is as shocking to us as it is the Killer himself. He is a man who has refined his craft through self-control and routine, keeping his inner voice from wandering by listening to The Smiths, and tracking his heart rate through a smartwatch. He may believe himself to be immune to human error, and yet it is exactly this which rears its head all throughout The Killer. Much like Michael Corleone claiming in The Godfather that his work is not personal but just business, there is a tension between this hitman’s voiceover and his actions. After all, as much as he would like to believe otherwise, the quest for vengeance that he sets out on shortly after this deadly slip-up is driven by nothing but his own furious desire for justice.

With such a vast emotional distance established between audience and character in The Killer, it is no wonder why David Fincher was drawn to its methodically structured screenplay. Murderous psychopaths have long been at the centre of his meticulous narratives ever since Seven, and even when his focus has drifted to less lethal subject matter in films like The Social Network, there still resides a vague hollowness in his characters. Still, The Killer delivers an icy interrogation of this mindset so distinct from any of those previous films that it is surprising Fincher hasn’t explored the psychological territory of a professional assassin sooner. Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir crime films have long been an influence on Fincher’s work, and so it was only a matter of time before he remodelled the rogue hitman story of Le Samouraï into his own painstaking character study of cold-blooded perfectionism and stifled vulnerability.

Like Melville, Fincher is also a dedicated technician of film lighting and colour, though much preferring his desaturated golden palettes and pronounced shadows over the French auteur’s cool blue washes. The Killer is formally divided into six chapters, each set to a different city made visually distinct by their architecture and weather, and yet it is that consistency in Fincher’s gloomy, yellow aesthetic which formally unites these locations within a treacherous underworld. Whether he is stalking a taxi driver along the tropical coasts of the Dominican Republic or a fellow assassin through the snow-blanketed streets of Chicago, the Killer’s silent operations are shrouded in shadow.

It is the highly controlled soundstages where Fincher is at his strongest though. The sources of his ambient lighting setups are frequently part of the scenery, with reading lamps, fluorescent battens, portable floodlights, and other fixtures decorating everything from high-end restaurants to bare apartments. It is thanks to these visible light sources that Fincher holds such a command over his darkness as well, letting us lean forward to pick out the incredible detail of his compositions without letting it entirely disappear.

It is a level of aesthetic precision that is not unusual for Fincher, but which here makes for a perfect formal match to the Killer’s slick, patient procedures, fastidiously traced through long stretches of purely visual storytelling accompanied only by that taciturn voiceover. “If you are unable to endure boredom, this work is not for you,” he informs us, and indeed the large majority of his work does not simply involve killing, but rather travelling, tailing, infiltrating, and waiting around to spring into action. Though he claims to have no affiliations, it is in these mundane moments that his idiosyncratic habits come to light – taking the bread off his breakfast muffins, for instance, or his routine stretching.

After years of working in franchises and briefly taking a hiatus from acting altogether, Fassbender’s return to auteur collaborations is very welcome here, applying an intensive focus to every action and thereby compelling us to do the same in our observations. Conversely though, the flashes of anger and panic that cross his impassive face whenever he is faced with unexpected diversions also develop a growing sense of unease, building to a violent climax when he is ambushed by a brutish hitman with multiple advantages over him.

Fassbender’s unblinking Killer may have a quick mind and agile body on his side, but he is not a machine, flawlessly executing plans with pinpoint accuracy. He is prone to errors, riddled with weaknesses, and perhaps even capable of the empathy he so frequently derides. Whether or not he can accept this, he cannot simply will his imagined supremacy into existence by repeating the same empty affirmations. This wannabe psychopath does not belong among the few who are truly void of emotion, but among the many who willingly fall victim to it, vulnerable to an innate humanity that limits perfectionism, yet equally expands our self-understanding.

The Killer is currently streaming on Netflix.

Martin Scorsese | 3hr 26min

The Osage Nation had already suffered one great upheaval in the 19^th century when the United States government forced them to relocate from Kansas to Oklahoma, cutting them off from their historical and cultural roots. Given the discovery of abundant oil in their new territory almost immediately after the funerial burial of a ceremonial pipe though, it appears as if the spiritual forces of nature have come to deliver them from their tribulations, sending manna from heaven that guarantees them a prosperous future. From their great loss springs new life, but while “the chosen people of chance” dance in slow-motion beneath the gushing well of newfound riches, the colonial powers that be are not so ready to let this opportunity slip through their fingers.

Just as Martin Scorsese seems to have had his final say on the gangster genre with The Irishman, a new spate of violent assassinations and underground conspiracies emerge in 1920s Oklahoma, though the victims in Killers of the Flower Moon are not rival mobs or compromised associates. The primary orchestrator of this plot is William King Hale, a wealthy rancher who purports to be a good friend to the Osage people, speaks their language, and even offers a reward to whomever comes forward with information regarding their senseless murders. He has the untouchable evil of Noah Cross from Chinatown, and yet Robert de Niro applies a genteel Southern charm to this chilling façade of warmth, consequently giving his best performance in almost thirty years.

From the perspective of the FBI agents coming to investigate these murders, this narrative could have very easily been a murder mystery, and indeed the early drafts of Scorsese and Eric Roth’s script were close to following this route. As it is, Killers of the Flower Moon does not play this game for very long, explicitly revealing which men have been killing the Osage people, and under whose orders.

At the centre of Hale’s plot as well is a cross-cultural marriage intended to grant him a large portion of the local wealth, and his nephew Ernest Burkhart is perfectly positioned in this matter. There is no doubt his budding romance with Osage woman Mollie Kyle is at least partly genuine, but there are few characters here as stupidly craven and weak-willed as him. He is a pawn in his uncle’s long game, blowing up his neighbour’s home and poisoning Mollie through her insulin shots, and yet somehow still finding the audacity to feel guilt over his despicable actions as he obediently carries them out.

This is the first time since This Boy’s Life in 1993 that Leonardo DiCaprio has starred opposite de Niro, and though there is a palpable screen chemistry between the two defining actors of their generations, Lily Gladstone stands toe-to-toe with them as the unfalteringly resilient Mollie. Having made a small name for herself in Kelly Reichardt’s indie dramas over the past few years, she now brings her softly spoken yet self-assured presence to a larger canvas, letting those moments where grief and fury break through her usually composed demeanour land with absolute devastation. Even as she pursues justice for her people, there is little that can sway her from her husband’s side, convincing herself that he may be the only innocent white American in the entire county. After all, how could anyone keep such a dangerous lie from their own family for so many years?

Just as the enormous running time of The Irishman sinks in the sad weight of a former hitman’s hollow life, the fact that the crimes depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon continued for so long without any legal ramifications is made all the more despairing by its sprawling scope. With a pace that thoroughly teases out each side character and subplot, Scorsese fully realises the enormous depth of this divided community, and further brings its setting to life through his authentic production design and sweeping camerawork.

There is a touch of Sergio Leone in these dynamic long shots, craning up above train stations, rural settlements, and oil fields to reveal the marks of white colonisers seeking to capitalise on the Osage people’s wealth, but Scorsese does not relinquish his own visual style so easily either. In one long take, he tracks his camera through a busy house hosting a party of Native Americans, and later when a ranch burns to the ground he envelops us in Ernest’s guilt-ridden fever dream, distorting silhouettes of men trying to fight the fire through its ethereal, orange haze. Hale and his men have unleashed hell on Earth, and there is little salvation to be found in this biblical blaze, embodying a fast-spreading, bitter derangement that sees a self-loathing Ernest drop a small dose of Mollie’s poison into his own whiskey. Conversely, Scorsese also draws on the animalistic iconography of Native American spiritualism, twice over haunting those targeted by Hale’s men with owls – an omen of death in many tribes.

In moments like these, Killers of the Flower Moon shifts away from the impression of factualism and reveals the inherent subjectivity that comes with dramatising history. Composer Robbie Robertson’s fusion of bluesy guitar riffs, humming vocals, and traditional pipes accentuates this point in its anachronistic delirium, and sadly marks his final film score before his passing earlier this year. Its formal consistency is unfortunately not a feature shared by the silent newsreel interludes that almost completely drop off after the first half hour, or the fourth-wall shattering epilogue that lacks any kind of setup. In moments like these, Scorsese’s film reveals itself to be a slightly more uneven work than The Irishman, angling at some critical point about reconstructing the past through storytelling, but never quite unifying it with the broader narrative.

As far as historical epics go though, Killers of the Flower Moon does not waste its length, and Scorsese’s reflections on the racial tensions of 1920s Oklahoma are never oversimplified. White man’s fetishisation of Indigenous people’s ethnic purity and skin colour is often written into the subtext of their creepy exchanges, and the Native American symbol of abundance represented in the titular ‘Flower Moon’ is effectively tarnished by the timing of Hale’s genocide.

This is a two-faced villainy bred not from ignorance, but from an intimate knowledge of one’s economic rivals, and the capitalistic belief that only the ruthless deserve to prosper. Not even family ties will stand in the way of Hale’s accumulating wealth, and the justice eventually delivered by America’s legal system is only a half-hearted indictment of the perpetrators accountable when their web of lies begins to unravel. For once, the existential despair that Scorsese leaves us with does not hang solely on his criminal characters and their catastrophic life choices. In the end, Killers of the Flower Moon is just as much a wistful lament for the exploitation of America’s Indigenous people, and the trust many of them placed in allies with warm smiles and greedy hearts.

Killers of the Flower Moon is currently playing in theatres, and will soon be streaming on Apple TV Plus.

Damien Chazelle | 3hr 9min

In the very first scene of Babylon, we find studio hand Manny trying to handle an elephant and transport it to a raucous party in the Hollywood hills. Later in the dusty night-time deserts of Los Angeles, ‘it girl’ Nellie squares up to a rattlesnake, ready to fight it in front of her fellow partygoers. Somewhere else in a sex dungeon that is hidden beneath the city, a chained alligator snaps at visitors, and a muscle-bound circus freak eats live rats.

That these people are constantly lowering themselves to the level of animals speaks multitudes about the bestial nature of their own humanity. As far as Damien Chazelle’s decadent vision of early Hollywood is concerned, there is little separating one from the other. Babylon swings as hard in its debauched maximalism as the pleasure-seeking characters populating its 1920s movie sets, and in doing so eagerly teases apart the connection between their pioneering genius and their self-gratifying depravity.

Chazelle is no stranger to exploring the insurmountable ambition of artists, nor is he one to shirk that quality in his own work. Babylon writhes with excitement at cinema’s potential during the years of its own formation, inviting us into Nellie and Manny’s first days on set via long takes energetically tracking through the scorching Californian desert. There, silent dramas unfold on pop-up wooden stages, hundreds of extras in Medieval armour clash for giant epics, and full orchestras play off to the side for dramatic effect. Frivolous squabbles and lethal catastrophes are equally part of the job, although the petty threats of Nellie’s jealous co-star clearly hold greater weight than the accidental impalement of an actor during a chaotic battle scene.

This isn’t the only collateral death to take place in Babylon either. It is often only after the dust has cleared that bodies are discovered, whether in the heat of a frantic shoot or in the drug-fuelled parties where cast and crew blow off steam. They are little more than unfortunate sacrifices to the vast industry being built, likened in the film’s own title to the mighty ancient city of Babylon which rose to indulgent heights and subsequently fell from God’s grace. In a slightly more obscure reference, it is also a nod to the famously gigantic Babylon set from the monumental silent epic Intolerance, itself typifying the spectacle of early Hollywood filmmaking. Either way, Chazelle’s symbolic intentions are clear. This modern empire of innovation contains both the best and worst of humanity, not as warring factions, but rather as qualities paradoxically contained in each individual, simultaneously carving out new artistic paths and feeding their own hedonistic, gluttonous egos.

Much like his characters, Chazelle doesn’t hold back from bombarding us with displays of absolute excess either. In ornate, golden halls where exotic dancers and drunken partygoers run wild, he fills his shots with expressionistic clutter, adopting the cinematic language of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930s romantic dramas. In this manner, there is also a hint of silent comedy conventions at play which dedicate the entire frame to visual gags, interrupting conversations with someone suddenly falling through a window in the background, or having a car appearing out of nowhere to crash into a statue.

Unlike so many of these silent comedies though, Chazelle’s camera couldn’t be more liberated from the constraints of static tripods. It announces its vigour early on in a shot that spends several minutes flying in acrobatic movements through a party, swooping above the heads of guests and right into the band’s blaring trumpets. Whip pans and tracking shots blend perfectly with Babylon’s rhythmic montages, and later as we cut between multiple urgent missions on movie sets, Chazelle’s parallel editing delivers a propulsive sequence which itself draws on this era’s formal innovations. Whether unleashing ecstasy or hysteria though, his kinetic direction keeps Justin Hurwitz’s up-tempo jazz score bouncing along by its side, pounding out bright, brassy motifs that look ahead to the rock ‘n’ roll music of future decades.

Virtually everything here exudes the cinematic vigour you would expect from the director of Whiplash and La La Land, and yet Babylon is far more aggressive than either in both form and content. It skewers the pretensions of its artists with derisive cynicism, sharply identifying their uninhibited amorality and the necessity of such behaviour to let their professional ambitions flourish. The hubristic downfall of early Hollywood is especially delineated with clearer lines and richer nuances though when our focus is narrowed down to the central figures in Chazelle’s tale, which he attaches to archetypes of his historical setting.

Although relative newcomer Diego Calva is technically in the lead as aspiring producer and Mexican immigrant Manny, he is not given as much material to chew on as Margot Robbie or Brad Pitt, essentially serving as the link between their parallel character arcs. Still, he carries the strain of the part well, nervously sweating as he races to pick up a rented camera before sundown, and visibly on edge as he descends several circles of hell into the “asshole of Los Angeles” to pay off a debt with fake money.

For Robbie, her turn as actress Nellie LaRoy may be her single greatest performance yet, luminously drawing attention in crowds and simultaneously mouthing off in a noisy New Jersey accent. She is the definition of a self-made movie star, rising to fame through sheer charisma, talent, and a little bit of luck, while refusing to consider the long-term ramifications of her reckless lifestyle. Like Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, she represents the glory of a historical epoch, though Nellie evidently carries far greater emotional baggage. With more conservative attitudes developing in the 1930s and the restrictive Production Code looming on the horizon, her attempts to reform her party girl image fall flat – she is willing to put on an act for the camera, but never to compromise her own identity.

Nellie is a clear surrogate for silent movie star Clara Bow, but she is just one of several historical substitutes populating Babylon’s expansive ensemble. Cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu asserts a magnetic presence, representing the real-life Anna May Wong as the first Chinese-American actress to gain international fame. Elsewhere, African-American bandleader Sidney Palmer parallels jazz drummer Curtis Mosby, finding himself contending with the industry’s systematic racism. There is a mythological quality to the legacy that each build during their times in the spotlight, standing in for an alternate vision of Hollywood not too distant from reality, though it is Pitt’s debonair film star Jack Conrad who wrestles with fame’s fleeting nature most directly.

Much like Douglas Fairbanks, Jack’s career takes a sizeable hit in the transition to sound films. He spies on audiences sniggering at his line deliveries, and an enlightening conversation with gossip columnist Elinor St. John forces a recognition of his own mortality within the ever-turning wheel of the film industry. A long take floating through his hotel brings his arc to a poignant end, but much like Nellie’s own ambiguous walk into darkness, there is an enduring indelibility attached to the image of his graceful exit.

At some point or another in Babylon, each major character finds peace in obscurity, finally allowing them an escape from the anarchy and copious bodily fluids of Hollywood’s incessant frenzy. Some of the drama here is not operating at the same level as many of the earlier scenes, slightly compromising the momentum Chazelle has built up, though the unadulterated experimentalism that he points his ending towards makes for a feverishly gratifying conclusion.

In its very last scene, Babylon steps beyond the confines of its own narrative, embracing the entirety of film history as an ongoing project of avant-garde invention, and involving each artist as an essential stepping stone along the way. They mix in playful, spontaneous patterns, much like the colourful dyes intercut throughout the manic montage, becoming part of something larger than any one of them. In this moment, Chazelle finally distils Babylon’s formal ambition into its most pure, self-aware state, all at once recognising the tragically human flaws of those who laid its foundations, and yet equally remaining steadfast in his intoxicated, eloquent expressions of love for the artform itself.

Babylon is currently playing in theatres.