Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me + The Missing Pieces (dir. David Lynch)
FWWM gets, or at least got a lot of shit when it came out, for two main reasons. Firstly, it isn't a two-hour episode of Twin Peaks; secondly, it doesn't conclude the season 2 cliffhanger, a direct continuation of which probably won't ever happen (the upcoming third season will pick up the story a full 25 years after the second, though series co-creator Mark Frost has written a book about some of the things that occurred during the gap). The story mostly concerns the last week of Laura Palmer's life, and this leads into the opening of the original series pretty much seamlessly, but the tone is much darker, the violence and sexuality are much more explicit, and the result is decidedly much closer to Lynch's more extreme material including Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and even Inland Empire.
This is my second time seeing the film, and while my response the first time was pretty lukewarm, I really loved the film this time around. Coming off the back of watching the original series for the second time as well, a lot of the just plain weird shit that goes down made a lot more sense to me. Both Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise give amazing performances as Laura and Leland Palmer, their ranges on full display from the comic to the terrifying, two major modes which dominate the film as a whole, but other series regulars, such as Dana Ashbrook, also deliver some excellent scenes. With The Missing Pieces, a 90 minute cut made entirely of deleted footage and extended scenes put together by Lynch in 2013, one also gets the sense of just how "Peaksy" the film was originally going to be, with extra scenes of Dale Cooper, Ed and Norma, the Briggs family, and a great comic scene with Lucy, Sherriff Truman, and Andy, as well as more scenes, both comic and disturbing, with the Palmer family. There's a fan edit which uses the original screenplay to put these new scenes in place, and the result is a 3.5 hour movie. I haven't seen that edit, but maybe someday it'd be cool to go back and check it out.
Overall, FWWM is full-on Lynch, and I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who has overlooked it to check it out. If you're interested in watching Twin Peaks, I'd say watch that first, because FWWM is a prequel, and while it does have quite a few differences, the main plot elements are intact, and you'll spoil the mystery for yourself if you watch FWWM first.
In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
Hard to talk about in terms of plot, not because there isn't one, but because to bring that to the fore would be to sell its best features short. Like the title says, this is more about a mood than anything, and it achieves a great sense of atmospheric continuity through its slow gliding camera action, almost claustrophobic sets and framing, and a dreamy, melancholic sense of isolation. The performances are almost deadpan, but a sense of pained repression creeps through, and by the end it's all kind of empty in an affectingly tragic way, with some extremely low-key humour popping up in places here and there.
Ultimately it's a very a graceful piece of cinema which definitely shows rather than tells. Despite its 98 minute runtime, the pace might catch you off guard — this is actually my second attempt, because the first time I wasn't expecting it to be so slow and it put me off. But ease yourself into the slow rhythm and the low-key mood of the piece, and I think you'll find it amply rewarding of that patience.