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 Tokyo that Ryōsuke moves to in The Only Son is not the bustling city of opportunity he once dreamed of, but a desolate wasteland of factories and smokestacks, underscoring Yasujirō Ozu’s tale of parental expectations and disappointments with the social realities of Depression-era Japan.
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.
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.
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.
Through Sing Sing prison’s rehabilitative theatre program, Divine G and his fellow inmates find realer versions of themselves beyond guilt and anger, as Greg Kwedar’s casting of the real men that this story is based on uncovers a raw, vulnerable authenticity.
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 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.
