Asked what his next film would be after his 1999 epic Magnolia, Hollywood wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson replied, “Somebody I’d really like to use is Adam Sandler. [...] I’m determined it will be 90 minutes. I’m gonna show the whole world…” With this attitude, the director also chipped away at many of his flashy trademarks: sprawling narratives, kaleidoscopic ensembles, voyeuristic camerawork and hubristic protagonists struggling to overcome themselves. In short, Punch-Drunk Love represented a leap of maturity and willingness to be unabashedly vulnerable. When toilet plunger salesman Barry Egan stumbles his way into an almost fairytale romance with his sister’s coworker, Lena, his mundane reality is elevated to the near-mythic—entailing a Herculean battle of love against hate (and phone-sex operators) that Barry must win when it begins to endanger his new sweetheart. Aided by Jeremy Blake’s impressionistic animations versus the scrappy pastiche of textures in Jon Brion’s sentimental score, Anderson allows emotion to reign supreme over the film’s rhythm, which elevates both the movie’s quirky humor and undeniable heart. Punch-Drunk Love sees both the director and his protagonist discovering that to communicate the depth of your love—whether for cinema or for your soulmate—you must overcome the greatest obstacle of all: your own habits and insecurities. – Gunnar Sizemore

The grammatical clumsiness of Ali’s German title Angst essen Seele auf (literally “Fear eat soul up”) immediately points to the film’s fascination with language. In what was one of his most visually restrained efforts since The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fassbinder creates a bilingual experience for the viewer, one in which the visual language communicates what characters cannot fit into spoken words. The tender, patient dolly work that almost exclusively situates Moroccan émigré Ali and his much older lover Emmi within two-shots communicates the attraction each feels for the other, though their conversations are often brief and stilted due to Ali’s faulty German. When the town finds out about their relationship, the bigoted protests are often masked by faux-politeness or silence, leaving the camera to create visual distance between the couple and the world. It is only when societal disapproval puts pressure on the relationship that Emmi and Ali reside in their own separate film frames, the sharp pain of their divide punctuated with each tense cut. Fassbinder’s poetic approach transforms what could have been just an homage to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and elevates it to a bittersweet commentary on class, racial prejudice, age and the transcendent qualities of love. – Gunnar Sizemore