Children of Men

Clive Owen and Danny Huston in Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006).

Slavoj Zizek talks in one of the DVD bonus features about how this film is notable because of the way the main character functions primarily as a filter through which we apprehend the background, the socio-enviro-political details that are the "real" subject of the movie. The truth is, they're not really the background at all--the screen shoves all the topical markers in our face and makes sure we get their relevance at every turn. Nevertheless, Cuarón is a visually thrilling director, and some of those details--the minister's medicated brother and his electronic hand gadgetry, the tricycle-rickshaws in the London streets, the commercials for the suicide pill "Quietus" ("You Decide When"), and some of the least banal use of seventies rock on a soundtrack since Breaking the Waves--go a long way toward rescuing the picture from its more heavy-handed tendencies toward mythic posturing and elegaical jeremiadism.