CineLinkr #207: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Sarah Polley's first feature as director, Away from Her, follows a marriage changed by Alzheimer's disease. It is a remarkably patient debut. Nobody in this film treats remembering as something a person can simply try harder at.
🟢 Easy: Feature directing debuts by screen actors
Movies: Eighth Grade · Mid90s · The Lost Daughter · Away from Her
Bo Burnham, Jonah Hill, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Sarah Polley step behind the camera for their first directed features. Their subjects range from adolescent discomfort to the fractures inside adult relationships.
Burnham's Eighth Grade makes school social life painfully immediate; Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter gives Olivia Colman a mother whose thoughts refuse easy reassurance. The connection is a career step, not a promise that performers all make the same kind of movie.
🟡 Medium: Reincarnation reconnects a past love
Movies: Chances Are · Dead Again · Made in Heaven · Om Shanti Om
Chances Are brings a dead husband back in another body, with a romantic situation that becomes awkward almost immediately. Made in Heaven gives lovers who met in the afterlife another chance on Earth.
Dead Again makes past identities part of a mystery. Om Shanti Om sends Om into another life, where Shanti's lookalike and her lingering ghost pull the old love back into view. Shanti herself does not reincarnate, so the category concerns the return of a relationship through one partner's rebirth, not two matching reincarnations.
🔵 Hard: Competitive chess drives the story
Movies: Fahim · Queen to Play · Magnus · Knights of the South Bronx
Magnus Carlsen's route to the 2013 World Championship gives the documentary its destination. Fahim follows a refugee prodigy seeking a championship of his own, with far more than a trophy at stake.
Queen to Play gives a hotel worker an unexpected hunger for the game. Knights of the South Bronx draws on teacher David MacEnulty's work with school chess teams. Training makes new futures imaginable for people who did not begin with equal advantages.
Chess belongs at the center here. The films build their conflicts around learning, competition, and the decisions that follow a serious commitment to the board. You cannot replace the game with a decorative chess set and keep these stories intact.
🟣 Tricky: Hardened loners protect endangered children
Movies: Léon: The Professional · Mercury Rising · The Man from Nowhere · The Marksman
Léon makes room for Mathilda after violence destroys her home. Bruce Willis's FBI agent in Mercury Rising protects a boy targeted by government assassins. The dangerous adult becomes the child's available shelter.
The Man from Nowhere drags a reclusive former operative back into violence to rescue his young neighbor. The Marksman puts a widowed Marine between a boy and cartel pursuers. Their solitary lives end when walking away becomes a choice they cannot make.
The pattern clicks through the relationship, not the weapon. All four men have skills that make them frightening; the child gives those skills a purpose beyond surviving alone. Retirement, in this genre, needs a better security deposit.
Polley's debut is the film I would return to after all that gunfire: its losses unfold without anyone to shoot. For a more practical rescue assignment, today's PixelLinkr puzzle sends firefighters into burning buildings.