A ‘revelatory’ work in more ways than one, Dogme 95’s first official entry sees Vinterberg masterfully throwing us into the deep end of dark secrets and hard truths, as a reunion of family and friends celebrating the 60th birthday of a patriarch turns into a moral catastrophe.
An old man who learns of his stomach cancer attempts to make the most out of his numbered days in Kurosawa’s powerful examination of body and soul, living and dying, and the societal conditioning of the common man in misjudging others.
Rohmer’s provocative final entry from his ‘Six Moral Tales’ calls attention to the temptation of extramarital affairs, as a man in a happy marriage contemplates putting his immoral theoretical thoughts into practice.
A couple discovers an underground subculture of car crash sexual fetishists in Cronenberg’s most transgressive work, an audacious masterclass of psychosexual filmmaking that portends the post-millennial existential despair and aberrant nihilism.
Peckinpah’s masterful final word on the Western, this elegiac piece, about a reluctant lawman hired to kill an outlaw who is a longtime friend, is a cat-and-mouse chase of an existential order, drawn out expertly as a cinema of delay and detour, as inertia begets inertia.
Varda’s first feature in colour, one that screams vibrant, cheery optimism from the get-go, becomes an ironic, if unsettling, take on happiness, set against gender inequality, as a husband in a truly happy marriage begins an extramarital affair.
Arguably Kaurismaki’s bleakest film, this portrait of a woman trapped in work and domestic monotony spirals into quiet doom and gloom as she contemplates a drastic action.
The first-ever feature made by a Black lesbian filmmaker, this deceptively smart auto-fictive engagement with the ‘absence’ of Black film history and personal identity asks us to recognise the voices that are missing in the age-old narratives that have come to pass.
Rohmer’s Oscar-nominated international breakthrough sees a reticent Catholic man navigate Pascal’s wager, sexual temptation and self-doubt during a wintry night of talk with a seductive divorcee, shot in striking black-and-white by Nestor Almendros.
A tale of beauty and decay, Visconti’s cinematic requiem for Thomas Mann sees Dirk Bogarde, in a quiet, despairing performance, playing an ageing composer obsessed with the perfect looks of a teenage boy, accompanied generously by Mahler’s heart-aching ‘Adagietto’.
Eternality Tan 