Del Toro: Pacific Rim (2013)

If Avatar heralded a revolution in 3D filmmaking, then Pacific Rim heralds a revolution in 3D IMAX filmmaking. Essentially an update of the kaiju and mecha genres for a post-cinematic era, it’s driven by a series of battles between giant reptilian aliens that emerge from an interdimensional portal beneath the Pacific Ocean and the enormous robots mankind creates to combat them. The sense of scale is staggering – the aliens are so big that they can’t even really be conceptualised, let alone visualised - meaning that it’s a perceptual as much as a physical battle, especially since the aliens are equipped with a fully-functioning hive mind. It’s not enough, then, for the pilots to simply maneouvre these robots – they’ve had to learn how to “drift” into each others’ minds as well, pooling neurological and perceptual resources as the aliens get larger and emerge more frequently. While 3D glasses go some way towards drifting the audience into four eyes as well, we’re still in a considerably more impoverished position, perceptually, than the pilots, making for a masterpiece of peripheral vision, a drift of immensities that can only be glimpsed at the corner of your eye, or imagined at the corner of your brain. What’s perhaps even more extraordinary is that del Toro not only makes room for a wonderfully eccentric human narrative, but for all the kitsch detritus and residue that the aliens leave in their wake. In fact, as the prologue explains, although it’s set in 2025, all the technology dates from 2013, when the aliens first emerged, embroidering it with the retro-futuristic minutiae that del Toro does so well. And the world that he evokes is on the same scale as his monsters, big enough to defeat them – for all its mega-spectacle, it leaves nearly everything to the imagination, barraging you with a wealth of detail that never feels like more than the tip of a tantalising iceberg.

Sorrentino: La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013)

Paolo Sorrentino’s first film since This Must Be the Place is once again about an aging artist – in this case, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a wealthy Roman novelist who takes stock of his life in the wake of his sixty-fifth birthday. Like This Must be the Place, the narrative is more or less extraneous to a fugue of musical-architectural set pieces – a refrain of frozen notes, or liquid buildings, depending on how you look at it, meticulously controlled and curated as a music video or a fashion shoot. In other words, it is a city symphony film, gradually folding Gambardella’s lavish, decadent party-hopping back into the substance of the city, just as the aristocratic spaces he frequents, and the princes and princesses that he meets, are gradually folded back into the classical structures that they originally colonised. Everything is on the verge of ossifying, turning to stone, as if the excesses of the Berlusconi era were already on the verge of deep classicism. And the film strives to evoke that last beat before its characters fade back into a frieze, just as they strive to prolong it through parties that fuse theatre, cabaret, performance art, site-specific installation and dark aristocratic ritual into a kind of sculptural solidarity, venues where stone can contemplate stone, flanked by porticos of sophisticated strippers and entablatures of burlesque artists. At times, Sorrentino’s camera is not unlike Raúl Ruiz’s in its architectural plasticity, except where Ruiz erects alternative buildings that somehow co-exist with more concrete co-ordinates, Sorrentino builds more directly on what we can already see, completing and consummating Rome with his camera, which conducts, or constructs, as much as it captures the cityscape. And while it’s not at all sentimental – it often matches the blistering disgust of Fellini or Antonioni – there’s a point where Sorrentino’s vision reaches such a panoramic totality that it becomes positively beatific, as if distant enough to determine that Rome's cult of poverty still outweighs its cult of wealth. Exhausting excess to evoke an even more sublime poverty, and exhausting the Berlusconi aristocracy to evoke an even more unimaginable austerity, it’s as much a critique of its era as L’Eclisse or 8 ½, a phantasmagoria of the present, a collective hallucination captured at the very moment that it’s dissipating and dispersing.

Swanberg & Gerwig: Nights and Weekends (2008)

Mumblecore films often feel like documentaries as much as entertainment, records of a community-in-progress, a set of connections and relationships that emerge as part of the film-making process. That’s particularly clear in the case of Nights and Weekends – it’s co-written and co-directed by Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, who also star as the two main characters, Mattie and James, trying to navigate the difficulties of a long-distance relationship between New York and Chicago, and was actually shot according to the chronology it depicts, with as much as six months left between some scenes. That said, although the film’s pretty much structured as a series of visits, Swanberg and Gerwig never go out of their way to clarify who’s visiting and who’s being visited, how long it’s been between visits, or the length of any one particular visit. For the most part, it’s not even clear whether it’s day or night – sometimes it seems like both in the same frame – meaning that there’s a continual awareness of blank time and space lurking around the fringes of everything, the white noise of impending transit leaching out the mise-en-scene, making every conversation and encounter feel like a momentary respite from the omniscient slipstream of bus stops, train stations and airports. In fact, it’s a bit like if Hannah Takes the Stairs were set exclusively at that one existential bus stop – even at its quietest moments, there’s a humid, occlusive overflow of light and white noise, or whatever light and white noise would be if they converged. Perhaps that’s why so much of it takes place on the floor, or in bed, or in the showers before and after sex – it really cements the shower as a mumblecore venue – as well as why there's such a peculiar emphasis on selfies and photoboothing, as Mattie and James search desperately for ways to fix themselves against the flux between them. At one level, then, it’s far more drab and downbeat than even Hannah Takes the Stairs – but, then again, the flipside of Swanberg and Gerwig’s dead space-time is that it opens up small tics and bodily gestures, the pregnancy of small objects, a totally new and poignant kind of kitsch. And that's beautifully summarised by Gerwig’s convulsive, awkward face, a collection of small objects and moments in itself, as it refuses to settles into one expression or register, tensed out between avoiding and facing the fact that it’s “probably guilty of being overly precious.”

Oshima: Taiyo no habaka (The Sun's Burial) (1960)

One of several films that Nagisa Oshima made about disaffected Japanese youth in the early 1960s, The Sun’s Burial traces out the rivalry between a pair of gangs against the otherworldy, ghettoised slums of Osaka. Fragmentary and elliptical, it’s set in a world of short-term solutions, amidst a generation waiting for the next catastrophe, certain that World War III would follow as quickly as World War II arrived. Like Pasolini’s films of the same period, there’s something redemptive about this criminal underclass – the only bearers of anything like a feudal honour code – but it’s far more fleeting and provisional. Perhaps that’s because teenagers were such a rare beast in Japanese cinema at this time – they jar too much with the mise-en-scene to feel like they could really redeem it, as if the most shameful legacy of Japanese defeat were in fact the rise of teen culture, regressing the nation to a new era of adolescence, driven by cult icon Kayoko Hanoo. To that end, Oshima uses the striking fashion and body language of his more or less nameless characters to evoke a new Japan emerging within the shell of the old Japan – lurid, garish and neon-lit, it often feels like a forerunner of the globalised, cyberpunk Japan that would become prominent in manga and 1980s science fiction, especially in a subplot that revolves around the blood trade. And yet it’s clear that Oshima’s fascinated by this aesthetic as much as he’s repelled by it – it’s a film made for teenagers by someone who’s deeply distrustful of them, with all the conflict that entails, a film that can’t but yearn to be cast aside with the “buried and useless trash” it eviscerates, too self-destructive to even believe in suicide anymore.

Jires: Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) (1970)

A dark fairy story in the vein of Jan Svankmajer or Tim Burton, this late masterpiece of the Czech New Wave describes a young girl’s coming-of-age through a series of surreal tableaux and set pieces. Caught between childhood and adulthood, and stranded in a small Czech town, 13-year old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerova) spends most of her time in the window seat in her bedroom, gazing out through the glass or in through the gauze of her curtain. On the street below, she watches a variety of traditional pageants passing before her eyes, while her bedroom becomes the stage for a series of increasingly bizarre sensual spectacles. As the film becomes more elliptical and abstract, inside and outside merge into a gauzy, glassy ambience, suffused with the luminous haziness of footage shot in a old mirror. In particular, Jires floods his foregrounds with blurred, translucent ephemera, sending blossoms, cobwebs and tongues of flame across the surface of the screen, subliminal as motes on an eyelid, mere ripples in the camera’s aqeuous humor. Not only does that make the film stock feel as permeable as Valerie’s window seat, a diaphanous membrane between real and spirit worlds, but it restores the original moment of sight as a tactile experience, scattering light across the surface of the eye. And there’s something deeply transformative about Jires’ light – it’s the light feared by vampires, folding the supernatural world into the waking world, just as it sublimates the sensuality of Valerie’s bedroom back into the street below. At little over an hour in length, and scored to the same plaintive musical refrain, it’s an exquisite tone poem, a paean to the strangeness of adolescence that’s only grown stranger over time.