#visual-style

#visual-style

There is a two-minute section at the midpoint of'Wuthering Heights' that had me briefly convinced I was watching the greatest movie ever made. We watch as Margot Robbie's Cathy wears Elton John's sunglasses, paws at flesh-coloured walls, and skips and jumps around an eerily manicured garden straight out of Monty Don's erotic nightmares. Charli xcx wails on the soundtrack, swaddled in reverb and metallic strings.

Announced on a random Thursday with little fanfare, Horizon Hunters Gathering is a new co-op game from the Guerilla team set in the Horizon universe, and will launch on PS5 and PC. The idea is that you and three other people will team up to tackle replayable hunts across several different game modes like Machine Incursion and Cauldron Descent. Both will be playable in an upcoming closed beta due at the end of February which you can sign up for here.

A biopic that skips along the surface of its subject, deriving cliched psychological insight from its traumatized source, The Chronology Of Water sees Kristen Stewart liquify Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir into a expressionistic slurry. In her feature debut as writer-director, Stewart takes explicit pains to explicitly render Yuknavitch's pain on screen, drenching the swimmer-turned-writer's life-spanning childhood abuse, young-adult hedonism, and professional success-in over-styled and overindulgent imagery.

"Fire of Wind" is a movie of images, and its attention to light and shadow, to the texture of faces and of tree bark, of foliage and terrain, is among the most careful and most daring that I've ever seen. (Mateus and Vítor Carvalho did the cinematography.) Although "Fire of Wind" is drastically different from other films in recent release, it nonetheless harks back to a venerable tradition in political filmmaking.

In 1981, a young Parisian director kickstarted a style of French cinema as synonymous with the decade to come as the Nouvelle Vague was with the 1960s, or poetic realism with the 1930s. The cinema du look was a term coined by critic Raphaël Bassan to describe the work of three young filmmakers - Léos Carax, Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix - overwhelmingly concerned with matters of style.

The basic premise of Him is so fun that I'm half-hoping someone else takes the idea and makes a different movie out of it. An injured up-and-coming rookie football quarterback is invited to work out with a veteran championship quarterback who may or may not be on the edge of retirement. Under increasingly absurd and nightmarish circumstances, it becomes clear the veteran isn't ready to cede the stage for the younger man.

starring Oscar Isaac as the anatomist and passionate freethinker Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature: no passe neck-bolts or big fringey forehead, of course, and if you compare him with portrayals by other actors Boris Karloff, Peter Boyle, Robert De Niro he is, for all the picturesque prosthetic scars, the nearest this iconic figure has come to being a bit of a hottie.

The two films embody a retreat from the dark, gritty, real-world templates that ran amok once the genre really took off over the last couple of decades. They offer a vision of heroism that includes self-sacrifice and protection of the innocent.