While their status as wildly inventive auteurs of the American independent arthouse may be almost entirely consolidated now as a result of their last few films, there was a time when Josh and Benny Safdie were two amateur filmmakers that weren’t particularly well-regarded, working in the deepest recesses of the mumblecore sub-genre. Their steady rise…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Rope (1948)
For all the talk about Alfred Hitchcock being the definition of conventional, not in the sense of it being derogatory but rather as a way of explaining how he defined cinema in a considerable way, he certainly did not find it difficult to experiment with form and content from time to time, as made abundantly…
The Late Shift (1996)
There’s nothing quite like the world of television – those omnipresent boxes that have become the source of both comfort and frustrations in the homes of viewers across the globe, serving the function of providing both entertainment and an insight into the real world. There are sometimes instances where there is an intersection of the…
Saloum (2022)
Something that you learn when expanding your horizons is that you can often open doors to some of the most extraordinary art. The global interest in films from beyond Europe and North America has gradually improved, and we’ve seen some truly exceptional works from around the world being widely celebrated, many of them formative texts…
In & Out (1997)
While we may have a long way to go, when it comes to the subject of inclusion and diversity, it is wonderful to look back and see how far we’ve come as a collective culture. There is still a lot of work to be done, but a lot of the world is starting to become…
The Fallen Idol (1948)
While their more notable collaboration may have been The Third Man (quite simply one of the greatest films ever made), Carol Reed and Graham Greene did collaborate on a few other projects, one of which is the woefully underrated The Fallen Idol, which is based on a short story Greene himself wrote in the 1930s,…
Best Sellers (2021)
Films about writers are about as effective as books about filmmaking – they’re only good to a certain extent, since there is an inherent challenge in cross-medium interference, whereby looking at one through the lens of the other can sometimes be a bit difficult. However, when they work, it can sometimes be extraordinary, especially when…
Nobody’s Fool (1994)
We all know someone like Donald “Sully” Sullivan – a person whose fierce rebellion against anything that even vaguely suggests that they are on the older end of the spectrum becomes almost their entire personality, which makes them both frustrating and endearing individuals. This is the stock character that occupies Robert Benton’s exceptional Nobody’s Fool,…
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. (2022)
In a quote that is often evoked when the subject of belief is brought up, Karl Marx so boldly called religion “the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions”, which has often been appropriated as the source…
Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
It seems almost absurd that Preston Sturges continuously fades into the background when we are talking on the subject of greatest filmmakers to ever work in the genre of comedy. Much like his contemporaries Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, Sturges was a filmmaker with a clear authorial vision, which extended beyond him being merely a…
