Actor · 1958

Michelle Pfeiffer

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

On film.briefs5

Being John Malkovich

Spike Jonze · 1999

Being John Malkovich (1999) is a surrealist comedy-drama written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer discovers a portal into actor John Malkovich’s mind, sparking a chain of ethical and existential complications among his wife, co-worker, and employer. With precise writing, restrained performances, and a singular conceptual rigour, it explores identity, desire, and control without resorting to explanation or sentiment.

13:00

The Age of Innocence

Martin Scorsese · 1993

Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel follows Newland Archer, a New York lawyer caught between dutiful engagement to May Welland and forbidden attraction to her unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska. Set in the rigidly codified world of 1870s Gilded Age society, the film uses meticulous craft — Michael Ballhaus’s measured cinematography, Thelma Schoonmaker’s unhurried editing, Elmer Bernstein’s sparse score — to render emotional repression as physical fact. It is a romance without consummation, a drama without outbursts, and a period piece that treats etiquette as ideology.

13:00

Batman Returns

Tim Burton · 1992

Tim Burton’s 1992 sequel discards superhero convention to explore abandonment and performance through Gotham’s grotesque, snowbound winter. With Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, and Michelle Pfeiffer delivering career-defining turns, it leans on Stefan Czapsky’s shadow-heavy cinematography, Bo Welch’s layered production design, and Danny Elfman’s jagged score to sustain a tone both festive and funereal. Structurally loose but thematically tight, it remains a landmark of auteur-driven genre filmmaking.

13:00

Mother!

Darren Aronofsky · 2017

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a psychological horror film structured as a closed-loop parable: a woman’s domestic peace unravels under successive invasions, culminating in annihilation and cyclical rebirth. Shot in tight proximity to Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, scored with near-total silence, and driven by escalating symbolic violation, it functions less as story than as sustained sensory provocation. Its themes—ecological violation, artistic narcissism, theological recursion—are delivered without irony or ambiguity. Critical reception was divided: many admired its formal rigour and intensity; others found its allegory reductive and its relentlessness exhausting. It grossed $44.5m on a $30m budget.

13:00

Scarface

Brian De Palma · 1983

Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Howard Hawks' original relocates the story to Miami's 1980 Mariel boatlift, with Oliver Stone's screenplay tracking a Cuban refugee's rise through the cocaine trade under Al Pacino at his most excessive. Giorgio Moroder's synthesizer score and a mansion-siege finale that a visiting Steven Spielberg helped shoot gave the film an afterlife in pop culture far larger than its mixed initial reviews suggested.