Producer

Megan Ellison

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

On film.briefs5

Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2017

Set in 1950s London, Phantom Thread follows Reynolds Woodcock, a revered but rigid haute couture designer, and Alma Elson, the waitress he takes as muse and wife. Their relationship unfolds through quiet power shifts, two deliberate poisonings, and the slow, unstitching and restitching of domestic and creative boundaries. Directed, written, and shot by Paul Thomas Anderson, it stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, and Lesley Manville, with a score by Jonny Greenwood and Oscar-winning costume design.

13:00

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson · 2012

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 drama follows Freddie Quell, a volatile WWII veteran, as he falls under the influence of Lancaster Dodd, leader of a fledgling philosophical movement. Shot almost entirely on 65 mm film, it relies on Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s physically precise performances, Jonny Greenwood’s jagged score, and a structure that favours ambiguity over exposition. Set in 1945–46, it explores post-war dislocation, the seduction of certainty, and the limits of personal transformation — without offering diagnosis, satire or resolution.

13:00

Zero Dark Thirty

Kathryn Bigelow · 2012

Zero Dark Thirty follows CIA analyst Maya across ten years of intelligence work leading to the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, it foregrounds process over personality, using chronology, repetition, and restraint to depict a hunt defined by uncertainty, attrition, and contested methods. Its strengths lie in its procedural fidelity and understated performances; its weaknesses stem from its refusal to contextualise torture or reckon with the broader consequences of the operation.

13:00

Her

Spike Jonze · 2013

In a comfortable near-future Los Angeles, a lonely letter-writer buys an artificially intelligent operating system and falls for the voice that answers back, in Spike Jonze's Oscar-winning screenplay.

13:00

Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson · 2018

A dictatorial mayor exiles every dog in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki to Trash Island over a manufactured flu outbreak, and his own twelve-year-old ward hijacks a plane to find his banished bodyguard dog among them. Wes Anderson's second stop-motion feature, drawing openly on Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, pairs meticulous handcrafted puppetry with a plot about political corruption and canine loyalty, while drawing sustained criticism for how it handles the Japanese setting and characters within it.