Kleber Mendonça Filho sets a vast stage for the tense political drama of The Secret Agent, tracing one dissident’s attempts to outmanoeuvre Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, and studying historic expressions of grief and resistance distorted by its cruel, bureaucratic censorship.
Although the silent protest of two young boys in Good Morning is aimed at their parents’ refusal to buy a television set, their frustration also extends to the small talk exchanged between grownups, marking an unusual comic turn for Yasujirō Ozu in his satire of everyday, superficial communication.
Yasujirō Ozu offers nothing but sympathy for one helpless mother’s agonising moral compromise in A Hen in the Wind, imposing the harsh, destitute architecture of postwar Japan upon her shame, as well as her desperate attempt to seek marital reconciliation.
What initially begins as a portrait of masculine rivalry in Eddington gradually reveals a study in reactionary control, capturing a microcosm of America’s tumultuous political landscape in one rural town, and cynically submitting to Ari Aster’s combustible, existential chaos.
When the patriarch of one affluent family is lost in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, there is little left to hold its fragmented remains together, and Yasujirō Ozu exacts a cutting critique of those intimate bonds weakened by class privilege.
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.
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.
The violent sounds of battle may be confronting to hear, but in Edward Berger’s take on All Quiet on the Western Front, the true tragedy of war emerges in the still, lifeless aftermath where grief is born, painting out World War I’s carnage in scenes of harrowing beauty, and centring a group of traumatised German soldiers trying to survive the last few weeks before armistice.
Preston Sturges’ confrontation of early Hollywood “message” movies in Sullivan’s Travels is a complex balancing act of conflicting tones, playing in the realms of slapstick, irony, and meta-humour to craft a screwball comedy unlike any that has come before.
The painter’s perspective that Céline Sciamma offers us in Portrait of a Lady on Fire uses its delicate renderings of seaside cliffs and eighteenth-century French manors as the setting for a gorgeous romance between an artist and her reluctant subject, powerfully intertwining their passions with classical archetypes vividly rooted in ancient Greek mythology.
