Fritz Lang’s majestic fable of ambition, betrayal, and vengeance stands as a monumental achievement of silent filmmaking in Die Nibelungen, lifting mythical kings and battles out of Germanic legend, and giving them operatic, larger-than-life form on the cinema screen.
In Philip Barantini’s refusal to cut away from his camera’s long, uncomfortable takes, Adolescence pushes a quiet form of insistence, bearing witness to the raw, fragmented, and unresolved mess left in the wake of one teenager’s horrifying crime.
It is a little ironic that Joseph Stalin should see so much of him himself in the first Tsar of Russia, yet Sergei Eisenstein nevertheless takes the metaphor as a creative challenge in Ivan the Terrible, painting a vision of oppressive tyranny in bold, inflammatory strokes that stands true across centuries.
Between a vengeful misanthrope and the guilt-ridden woman he holds accountable for his son’s death, Alfonso Cuarón studies the confounding subjectivity of storytelling in Disclaimer, exposing painfully conflicting perspectives woven into the very structure of his series.
The question of what exactly constitutes a fraud is meticulously woven throughout Steven Zaillian’s monochrome study of a New York con artist in Ripley, witnessing his unscrupulous attempts to ascend the social ladder by way of identity theft and murder, even as his own amoral corruption threatens to sink him into a dark, suffocating abyss.
Through Peter Jackson’s extraordinary adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s grand fantasy epic, we appreciate Middle Earth as one of the richest fictional worlds of literary history, imbuing The Lord of the Rings with a breathtaking cinematic awe that centres the smallest, unconventional heroes in a battle against forces of great spiritual corruption.
The vivid imagination of Ingmar Bergman’s young protagonist in Fanny and Alexander is as enchanting as it is frighteningly dangerous, expressing itself through vibrantly festive mise-en-scène and impressionistic supernatural visions, and forming the basis of a deeply sentimental rumination on childhood wonder, trauma, and grief.
Even by Ingmar Bergman’s standards, Dr Jenny Isaksson’s characterisation is layered with immense psychological depth in Face to Face, treading a fine line between realism and surrealism as her childhood traumas, insecurities, and mortal fear of death chaotically rise to the surface after years of emotional repression.
Ingmar Bergman uses six isolated episodes of Johan and Marianne’s married life to piece together a collage of a fragmenting relationship in Scenes From a Marriage, turning their divorce not into a battle of husband versus wife, but rather lovers versus the space between them.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s enigmatic odyssey through a criminal underworld of sex traffickers, drug lords, and vampires demands a patient willingness to fall under its neon-soaked trance, as Copenhagen Cowboy invites us to traverse the psychological terrain of its stoic, otherworldly protagonist through a mesmerisingly surreal quest for vengeance.
