Robert Altman was certainly awfully busy in the 1970s – he had started as a director-for-hire in the late 1950s, but it was only when he made MASH that he started to take on something of an authorial voice as both a writer and a director. Over the course of the following decade, he’d make…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)
It seems that one of the great cinematic inevitabilities is that every major director, should they work for long enough, will end up making a film that is immensely personal to them. The two broadest categories are those that focus on their upbringing (which have become more common in recent years), and self-reflective examinations of…
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
There comes a moment when every viewer looks at a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and finds themselves somewhat at a loss for words. The duo, affectionately known collectively as The Archers when working together, produced work of such an immensely high calibre, it seems almost inexplicable that someone can consider them to…
Novocaine (2001)
The act of describing Novocaine is certainly a challenge. Not too many films like this tend to come about all that often anymore, and when they do, they’re mostly defined by a very precise control of tone and register that establishes them as potential cult classics, something that has yet to be bestowed on this…
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Would it be cliche to begin this conversation by saying that the story at the heart of Beauty and the Beast (French: La Belle et la Bête) is based on a tale as old as time? Regardless, this is the perfect entry point to starting our discussion on Jean Cocteau’s masterful adaptation of the timeless…
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Very few novels have had as bizarre a journey to the screen as Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the semi-autobiographical account of the trip he and his eccentric lawyer took to Las Vegas in the early 1970s, focusing on fictionalized adventures of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, the surrogates for the…
Shoeshine (1946)
Few filmmakers have been able to capture the human condition in as much vivid detail as Vittorio De Sica. Many may debate who the true master of Italian neo-realism is, based on parameters such as who made the first essential work, or the extent to which they strove to represent a particular period in the…
Reflections of a Blender (2010)
One of the most beautiful aspects of postmodernism is that once a work of art aligns itself with this revolutionary movement that has questioned reality for the better part of half a century, there’s very little that can be viewed as implausible. So many artists have found ways to stretch the boundaries of the collective…
The White Lotus: Sicily (2022)
From the first moment I spent with the characters in The White Lotus, I knew that it would be inevitable that I would make the rare exception to write about a television show. It often becomes quite unwieldy to discuss them, since so much depends on the cumulative nature of multiple seasons, and they often…
Notorious (1946)
Let us be perfectly honest here – we’ve discussed Alfred Hitchcock on nearly two dozen separate occasions, and in every one of those reviews, reference was made to the esteemed director’s impeccable and undeniable genius, even in the case of the rare misfire that comes about when dealing with someone so prolific. Few filmmakers could…
The Postmodern Pelican 