Weir's The Way Back is a riveting film, bracketed by monochrome newsreel material, first of the invasion of Poland, later of the cold war from 1945 to the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and centres on Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a Polish lieutenant tortured by the Russian secret police and sent to the gulag on trumped-up charges.
Beautifully shot, the film is bracketed by Singh's initial refusal — after a stinging loss at the Rome Olympics in 1960 — to participate in a friendly competition in Pakistan.
Two major dates bracket the film's narrative: 4 June 1976, when the Sex Pistols played to a small audience at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, and 18 May 1980, the day Curtis took his life.
What does interest me is how the man who directed "The Martian" (2015) could bracket that film, so wry and so fleet of foot, with a pair of such groaningly mirthless trips to yet more distant worlds.
I think on balance he was right.' Scott has also said he had had no interest in science fiction before Star Wars, but his next two films fell into that bracket, and made his reputation.
Radically pruning Lampedusa's novel, Visconti brackets his film between two transformative social events: the battle in the streets of Palermo, as Garibaldi's red-shirted soldiers (the foresighted Tancredi among them) rout the local forces, and the great ball (undated in the movie, but two years later in the novel) at which Angelina will make her society debut.
Barnes enters carrying a paperback book whose front cover bears a photograph of Preminger, wearing glasses and looking pensive, within a design featuring the bracket holes on film strips).
And so the plan to use the world premiere production of Adam's Passion, staged in a former submarine factory in Tallinn, as the outer bracket for the film was perfect.
It's evident from the output that video games can be inspired by art; they can inspire art; and, ultimately, they deserve to be bracketed – along with film, TV and animation – as art.
