The rule of law is little more than an arbitrary imposition of authority in Zero for Conduct, and it is up to the roguish schoolboys of one French boarding school to restore the natural order, as Jean Vigo playfully mounts a rising disenchantment towards anarchic revolution.
In Destiny’s eternal struggle between love and death, a young woman bargains to win her fiancé back from the afterlife itself, navigating a series of tragically romantic tales through Fritz Lang’s extraordinary Gothic anthology.
Even as Carl Theodor Dreyer holds the witch trials of one small Danish village in great contempt, Day of Wrath never truly rules out the question of whether some transcendent power is at play, sending the damned to early graves while the living stoke destructive flames of rumour and suspicion.
The perpetual misfortunes that plague one Jewish professor in A Serious Man often seem like the setup for a joke with no punchline, damning him to an ungratifying search for life’s answers through both science and faith, and thereby delivering one of the Coen Brothers’ most enigmatic, ironic works.
Through the colourful, layered motifs that Luca Guadagnino weaves through the life of American expat William Lee, Queer delivers an unflinching fever dream that denies easy answers to his internal contradictions, constantly unravelling his capacity for love by his fear of being seen.
There is a soothing liberation in the setting of Mumbai’s sun, allowing love to flourish without judgement, yet the creeping loneliness and social pressures which split two female flatmates in All We Imagine as Light also imbues Payal Kapadia’s drama with a tender, dreamy melancholy.
The greatest cinematographers of film history, from Technicolor pioneers to lighting virtuosos.
John Ford’s sentimental mythologising cannot be criticised for a lack of rousing sincerity in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, commemorating the dutiful perseverance of one Old West cavalry troop seeking peaceful resolution to a historic conflict, and basking in the vibrant majesty of the rugged American wilderness.
The struggle to survive in the Siberian wilderness of Letter Never Sent is as psychological as it is physical, swallowing four diamond-hunting adventurers up in its primordial chaos, and forcing us through Mikhail Kalatozov’s daunting camerawork to bow down before its ravaging elemental forces.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may not possess the rich character work of the other prequels, yet Wes Ball’s development of this majestic, tribal world through the legacy of its ancestors is admirable, examining splintered ideological factions that exploit sacred doctrine for their own selfish purposes.
