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Napoleon (2023)
Beyond Napoleon’s uneven, unfocused narrative, Ridley Scott commands brilliant spectacle and irreverent humour in his portrait of the infamous French emperor, cynically revealing the childish fool in the intelligent tactician whose enormous ambitions cannot sustain his own ego.
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Saltburn (2023)
With an obscure set of animalistic metaphors and perverse power plays, Emerald Fennell weaves a monstrously sinister fable around lower-class outsider Oliver Quick and his wealthy hosts in Saltburn, painting a darkly satirical portrait of class tension, obsession, and exploitation at their majestic country estate.
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Funny Games (1997)
There is a perverse ritualism to the torture that two young strangers exact on one helpless family in Funny Games, and yet in Michael Haneke’s disturbing piece of horror metafiction they are simply the storytellers serving the gratuitous tastes of us, their audience, who guiltily respond to their sadistic manipulation of narrative conventions with fear,…
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The Sacrifice (1986)
As if filtered through the prism of one man’s existential trepidation, Andrei Tarkovsky casts a delicate ethereality across the elemental textures and theological iconography of The Sacrifice, lulling us into the soothing despair of a looming nuclear holocaust that may or may not be averted through enormous spiritual offering.
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The Player (1992)
Through the satirical crime plot of a movie studio executive who accidentally kills a rejected writer, The Player offers a subversive metacommentary on a modern, commercialised Hollywood that places profits above art, as Robert Altman disturbingly exposes an insidiousness baked into its manufactured narrative conventions.
