Jean Cocteau was an artist whose name immediately brings one of two projects to mind – we immediately associate him with either the gorgeous 1945 version of Beauty and the Beast (the finest version of that story told until Angela Carter reconfigured it many decades later), or his Orphic Trilogy (consisting of Orpheus, The Blood…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Uptown Saturday Night (1974)
It is necessary to start this review with a disclaimer. Unfortunately, one of the reasons behind Uptown Saturday Night being relatively under-discussed in recent years has to do with the fact that this is a buddy comedy, in which one half of the central duo is played by someone who has deservedly fallen out of…
Dead for a Dollar (2022)
One simply cannot discuss New Hollywood without talking about Walter Hill. A filmmaker whose career as a director and writer stretches back to the very beginning of the movement that helped the industry develop into the ambitious cultural utopia it is seen as today, his legacy is undeniable, even if his films tend to vary…
Leap of Faith (1992)
Faith is a fascinating concept – few ideas have divided the population for centuries more than religious belief, especially the kind of blind faith that many religions are impelled to portray, which has led to many cynical conversations about how one can believe in something that is not tangible. However, it has also created a…
Blonde (2022)
It is an unimpeachable fact that Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognizable, iconic figures of 20th-century culture, a face that has adorned every conceivable kind of media across nearly every country around the world. Yet, did we ever truly know who she was? Her legacy is one that is unfortunately defined by the…
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)
You simply can’t look at the work of Yasujirō Ozu and not discuss the impact of the Second World War on the stories he told. He was a filmmaker that may have rarely addressed the war directly, but rather crafted stories that were situated around the time, focusing on the social and cultural changes brought…
The Munsters (2022)
They often say that comedians are very adept at horror, since they understand the dark places from which humour comes from better than most. However, we can also invert this idea and see whether it is applicable from the other way around – can those more well-versed in horror make effective comedies? One person who…
Un chant d’amour (1950)
Despite running at a diminutive duration of 26 minutes, Un chant d’amour remains one of the most important films in the history of experimental cinema. The only official directorial effort by esteemed French author and playwright Jean Genet, who undertook an impressive but dangerous challenge of telling a story centred around queer issues, it is…
The Woman King (2022)
Every year, when confronted with a flurry of remakes, reboots and revivals, someone will doubtlessly express the fact that Hollywood is running out of ideas, and that blockbusters are not allowed to be original anymore, or else they will struggle to turn a profit. Obviously, this is not a delusion, since we’ve seen so many…
Fearless (1993)
Art has always been interested in examining a few fundamental themes – love, death, family and the meaning of life are essentially the main ideas that have persisted for about as long as art has been produced, regardless of the medium. We can group these themes under the general category of the human condition, which…
