The phrase “they don’t make films like they used to anymore” is a hackneyed concept usually brought out to disparage contemporary works, which are often unfairly compared to those of yesteryear, particularly by people who tend to look at previous decades through rose-tinted glasses. Yet, there are some genres where this phrase is not only…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
Being a parent is not easy, and anyone who says otherwise is either the recipient of some unusually good luck or completely unaware of the challenges that come with raising children. It doesn’t even require having children of your own to recognise that this is not a particularly smooth journey, since it is almost universally…
Wide Open Faces (1938)
Comedy serves many different functions, but more than anything else, we find that the best comedies are usually those that present a snapshot of the time and place in which they were produced. The late 1930s were not a particularly pleasant time in the United States – the country was in the final stages of…
My Father’s Shadow (2025)
One of the bravest and often most challenging parts of making a film is realising that every piece of art one creates is rooted in the personal, even if it isn’t intentional. We all tell stories that resonate with us, and even the most abstract and experimental works are often formed as a result of…
Urchin (2025)
In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag critically discussed how we position ourselves as empathetic beings, expressing our desire to help those who are less fortunate than us – but in the process, repeated exposure to those who are suffering can cause a psychological fatigue, even amongst those who genuinely set out…
Georgia (1995)
Independent cinema has had a long and storied history, but it cannot be viewed as a single endless stream, but rather a series of chapters, each one defined as something of a generation in a long journey towards negotiating the boundary between the mainstream and the arthouse. One of the most fascinating, at least in…
Pin de fartie (2025)
Pinpointing an artistic movement to a particular work or moment in time is difficult, since we’ve come to learn there’s nothing that can be considered truly original – as Roland Barthes said, “a text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”, which is the very foundation of postmodernism as a…
Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007)
Purely based on logic, it seems implausible that there is any subject that could attract a range of notable names in the entertainment industry to gather for a discussion, in which this group includes the likes of Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier, to Joan Rivers and Chris Rock, and everyone in between. However, such a…
Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
“Images of the past overlap those of the present “ These words are spoken by Lina Soualem, whose voice is heard primarily as the narrator of her film Bye Bye Tiberias (Arabic: باي باي طبريا), in which she travels from her home in France to a small village in Palestine, in an effort to unearth…
Nouvelle Vague (1990)
Where does an artistic revolutionary go once the world has caught up with their ingenuity? Some are put out to pasture, fading into obscurity through struggling to come to terms with a rise in popularity, indicating that they were no longer symbols of the avant-garde and instead highly influential remnants of a bygone era. Others…
The Postmodern Pelican 