20. The Duke of Burgundy
British director Peter Strickland’s ‘Burgundy’ is no less than his previous movie when it comes to mood and atmosphere, establishing rotten-fruit eroticism between his two central characters who are engaged in a game of sexual domination and submission fifty shades knottier, kinkier and more complex. Who truly calls the shots in the relationship is the story’s central trick. In dealing so thoroughly with the nature of fetishization, the film becomes an exercise in fetish itself, from the sensuous sucking of seamed silk stockings, to the polishing of leather boots, even to including a credit for a fictional perfume “Je Suis Gizella,” as though Strickland wants us to imagine a runner spritzing the air with a baroque atomizer between takes.