If all the world is a stage, then A Big Bold Beautiful Journey sensitively understands the roles we must play to uncover hidden truths, channelling Kogonada’s immense imagination through the romantic, metaphysical odyssey that two strangers undertake into each other’s memories.
Although Taeko and Mokichi’s marriage has been left to wither in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, Yasujirō Ozu never stops yearning for the love that lingers beneath their contempt and sorrow, seeking a return to steady companionship through routine, redemption, and grace.
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.
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.
When a man serving on a jury recognises his own unexpected culpability in Juror #2, moral turmoil begins to stir his conscience, offering a rich subject for Clint Eastwood’s study of stifled, agonising guilt.
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.
As two amusingly dissimilar cousins reconnect to their Jewish ancestry in Poland, A Real Pain also sensitively examines their reconnection with each other, binding polar opposites together through humour, compassion, and generations of unresolved trauma.
The unity of art and politics was not exactly a new concept in the 1960s, but Bob Dylan’s refreshing brand of celebrity that is both radically outspoken and mysteriously private inspires awe in A Complete Unknown, soulfully capturing the countercultural icon’s elusive, inscrutable essence.
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.
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.
