The Grapes of Wrath Goes Dour To Properly Explore The Brutal Plight of the Joad Family

Though apparently softened down from its John Steinbeck penned source material (particularly in terms of its ending), The Grapes of Wrath carries with it a startlingly grim tone that, much like In a Lonely Place, doesn't feel like the kind of thing you might find in a movie made under the Hayes Code era of American filmmaking. This was an era where tidy morality and an upholding of a narrowly defined status quo were emphasized greatly, so it's shocking to see a movie like The Grapes of Wrath tell a tale this committed to a dour aesthetic as well as make villains out of law enforcement individuals with nary a good cop in sight to establish some kind of #NotAllCops message to appease Hayes Code censors.

Broken Souls Find Momentary Comfort And Longer-Lasting Pain In Persona

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #16
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #28

Let it never be said that Ingmar Bergman does not start off his movies in a manner reminiscent of the immortal Smash Mouth lyric "...hit the ground running." The very first scene in Persona is an abstract compilation of seemingly unrelated footage playing off, some of it grisly, some of it silly, before we see a nameless character emerge from a hospital bed and approach a giant screen. Then the opening credits start up, kicking off the plot proper. Once that was all over, I kind of just had to pause for a moment and figure out what on Earth I had just watched. The fact that the film itself just casually goes about its business after that perplexing opening sequence. Okee-dokee, I guess that's the kind of motion picture I'm in for?

No One Escapes The Invitable In The Seventh Seal

Rare is the work of fiction that doesn't at least notice the presence of death. Some of the most famous large-scale blockbusters of the past few decades like Harry Potter and Star Wars have their entire plots motivated by loss, parents are always biting the dust in animated Disney fare and the 1957 Swedish motion picture The Seventh Seal revolves its entire story around a personification of death following around one man, Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), in the time of the Crusades. This is also an era where the Black Plague is ravaging the land, taking countless people's lives and leaving many in a state of understandable panic.