Cinematic escapism

As we trudge back to the grindstone and remind ourselves to remember that it’s 2025 and not 2024; that Donald Trump will be inaugurated for a second term; that the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and countless other places still wage on, even as they may have slipped from the headlines, it’s a good time to turn to the history of the movies for old films that still have the power to transport, entrance, and captivate for a few brief hours of escape from today’s problems.

These three innovative and visually impressive films create the kind of multi-sensory magic that only movies can conjure and are best experienced on as big a screen as you can manage to make possible at home.

A magically dancing newspaper, a tragically floating wedding dress, a struggling child trekking up a hill in a terrible blizzard — the imagery in these films and their creators’ dedication to pushing boundaries and exploring the imaginative possibilities of cinema make them the kinds of films that you can always turn to when days are dark for moments of reprieve, release, and inspiration.

The Arthouse Essential  

The Red Shoes - YouTube

An astounding work of cinematic magic-making that still, almost 80 years since its 1948 release, casts a spell that few movies have since managed.

Made by two ingenious collaborators — British director Michael Powell and Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger — at the height of their powers, it’s the original behind-the-scenes-backstabbing, high-passions-of-the-ballet-world film.

 Real-world ballerina Moira Shearer stars as fictional ballerina Victoria Page, caught in a fiery love triangle between genius impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and sensitive composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). One man offers her the chance she needs to become a ballet legend, the other offers her the love she so desperately craves — the decision she makes will either save or destroy her life.

Rendered in glorious, no-longer-possible Technicolor and featuring an audacious 15-minute original ballet sequence that still has the ability to awe with its imagination and surreal beauty, it’s an immortal classic. Long after the deaths of everyone involved in its making, it continues to entrance and intrigue generations of film lovers and filmmakers and remains the kind of film you can endlessly rewatch to renew your faith in the possibilities of the movies.

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The Stone-Cold Classic

L’Atalante - YouTube

French director Jean Vigo died at the age of 29 and only began making films when he was 23. In that brief six-year period, he made a handful of films that remain legendary in the annals of cinema for their visual ingenuity and heart-achingly poetic realism.

This, his final and only full length, tells the tragic story of a young country woman who is married off to a boat captain, only to find that she longs for the experiences of the world beyond the confines of her new life on the water.

The setup may be traditional and familiar but the execution is anything but, as Vigo uses a host of way-ahead-of-their-time visual tricks and innovations to bring the inner turmoil of his doomed heroine to breathtakingly beautiful cinematic life.

The result is a film that still, over 90 years after its release in 1934, manages to be one of movie history’s most bold, surreal, poetic, and affectingly human examinations of love, desire, and longing. It is, as Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw has observed, “more modern than anything being made today.”

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The Diamond in the Rough

Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams - YouTube

 Japanese master Akira Kurosawa was 80 when he made his most personal film — a collection of eight short films based on his dreams. While it was made possible with the help of US directors Martin Scorsese (who has a cameo playing Van Gogh in one of the films) and George Lucas — both of whom revered his work — it failed to impress critics or audiences upon its release in 1990.

Time has, perhaps, been kinder to it than its director might have imagined and that’s because there is plenty of visually impressive poetry on display in these vignettes. They may not always convince that dreams are as interesting to everyone else as they are to the dreamer, but they still work together to offer a cumulative series of memorable and ultimately quietly moving reflections from an artist who, even in his final years, was seeking to push himself to new creative heights.

Each film stands on its own while still flowing cohesively into the next. Viewed together, they’re a useful guide to the director’s overarching interests and passions over a half-century career that stands as one of the most revered in cinema.

It is not near the perfection of Kurosawa’s most celebrated and fabled works, of which there are many, but it is still something that remains far more interesting and curious than its critics were perhaps willing to admit at the time.

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