Actor · Voice actor · 1952

Isabella Rossellini

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

Brand upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin · 2006

Guy Maddin’s 2006 silent-film pastiche follows a man revisiting his childhood home — a lighthouse-orphanage — triggering twelve chapters of repressed memory. Filled with Freudian horror, surreal ritual, and maternal vampirism, it uses stylised performance, intertitles, and Jason Staczek’s score to build a world where trauma repeats like a scratched record. Narrated on screen by Isabella Rossellini, it is arthouse cinema at its most formally committed and emotionally raw.

13:00

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

Stig Björkman · 2015

Stig Björkman’s 2015 documentary assembles Ingrid Bergman’s letters, diaries, and home movies into a first-person portrait, voiced by Alicia Vikander and Melinda Kinnaman. Interviews with her children and peers provide grounded counterpoint. Structured chronologically and sparingly scored, it privileges Bergman’s voice over analysis—succeeding where her writing is rich, thinning where it ends.

13:00

Wild at Heart

David Lynch · 1990

David Lynch’s 1990 Palme d’Or winner adapts Barry Gifford’s novel into a hyper-stylised Southern Gothic crime film starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as a couple fleeing violence across the American South. Anchored by Elvis obsession, Wizard of Oz motifs and Angelo Badalamenti’s score, it trades psychological realism for emotional extremity — landing some sequences with unforgettable force, while others rely too heavily on shock. Its value lies in its unwavering commitment to a singular, dissonant vision.

13:00

Blue Velvet

David Lynch · 1986

David Lynch followed the disaster of Dune with a $6m film he was left almost entirely alone to make, trading a pay cut for final cut. Kyle MacLachlan's amateur sleuth spies on Isabella Rossellini's abused nightclub singer and runs into Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, and the American town around them turns out to hide as much as either of them.

13:00

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Dean Fleischer Camp · 2021

A documentary filmmaker moves into an Airbnb and finds Marcel, a talking, one-inch-tall shell living there with his grandmother Connie, and starts filming his daily routines. When the resulting videos make Marcel briefly famous, he has to decide whether that attention can actually help him find the family he lost years earlier.