‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Exploring #13: Denis Villeneuve
Author / Eternality Tan
Megalopolis (2024)
With incredible abandon and ambition, Coppola’s work, infused with Roman allegory, is staggering in terms of craft despite its rather clunky storytelling, as a time-controlling architect hopes to rebuild a new utopian city that is future-looking.
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3 Faces (2018)
Panahi’s fourth feature since his house arrest is familiar in terms of his usual mode of cinematic address, but this time he paints a desolate picture of patriarchy rearing its ugly head amid some quiet moments of poetic beauty.
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Fairytale (2022)
An unsurprisingly quaint coda to Sokurov’s extraordinary career, as archive footage is combined with deepfake technology, resurrecting Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Churchill as spectral artefacts in a liminal, purgatorial space between death and death.
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Daughters (2024)
A meaningful social initiative to connect young daughters with their incarcerated fathers is the subject of this rewarding Sundance award-winning documentary that might be one of the most moving films of the year.
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Legendary Weapons of China (1982)
Offering almost nothing in terms of plot and characterisation, Lau’s film is an often hilarious if skilful showcase of a series of dynamic action ‘spectacles’ one after another.
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Way too stilted and spiritless performances mar Schoenbrun’s aesthetically ‘flamboyant’ but ultimately vacant feature about gender and mediated identities, as two teenage social misfits find a human connection over a long-running television show that mysteriously gets cancelled.
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Snow Leopard (2023)
The death of nine sheep at the jaws of a snow leopard incurs the wrath of a sheepherder in Tseden’s occasionally farcical take on small-town moralities as the ideals of ‘law’ and ‘justice’ are challenged.
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Perfumed Nightmare (1977)
An unclassifiable but whimsically rewarding anti-neocolonialist travelogue that sees the director turn the camera onto himself as he leaves his poor village and discovers how ridiculously modern the Western world is.
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Beau travail (1999)
Visually stunning, contemplative and disruptive, Denis’ brilliant take on toxic masculinity—for men, and by men—revolves around one French Foreign Legion sergeant’s attraction and repulsion towards a new recruit.
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