John Carney has had quite a fascinating career, having made two absolute masterpieces in the form of Once and Sing Street, intimate musical dramas set in his native Ireland, focusing on characters using the power of music to express themselves in a world that doesn’t understand them. Sandwiched between these two fantastic films is a…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
At first glance, The Quatermass Xperiment may not appear to be anything particularly special. It seems like yet another low-budget science fiction film from the 1950s, which told bizarre tales of the unknown, interlaced with metacommentary surrounding the Cold War. However, a slightly deeper look will reveal how absolutely essential this film is, a vital…
Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
There’s something so compelling about Australian cinema – many fantastic discussions have been had about how their unique perspective and willingness to venture further than many others have resulted in some absolutely fantastic, and often quite provocative, works of filmmaking. Regardless of the specific genre, there is often a spark of genius that underpin these…
Black Pond (2011)
The Thompsons are a well-meaning, ordinary British family living in the countryside. They’re headed by the cheerful Tom (Chris Langham), his dedicated wife Sophie (Amanda Hadingue), and their two daughters (Anna O’Grady and Helen Cripps), who have recently left their pastoral home in pursuit of a life in London, where they stay with their roommate,…
Coming to America (1988)
For two or three generations of people born between the 1960s and late 1990s, Eddie Murphy was the biggest star in the world – he could do absolutely no wrong, and even his most reviled from produced during his heyday have some passionate supporters. Unfortunately, some of his career choices after that were questionable (but…
Man Wanted (1932)
The Pre-Code era brought us many daring and provocative projects, featuring subject matter that would not stand a chance at making its way into mainstream film after the Hayes Code was established in the mid-1930s, which essentially sought to censor anything even mildly against the conservative principles of Joseph Breen and his very strict opinion…
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2021)
The human mind is a fascinating concept, since it is the factor that unites everyone, from doctors to philosophers, psychologists to artists, and every profession in between, provoking discourse that aims to get to the very root of what it is that drives us as a species, if such answers even exist. The precise reason…
I Live in Fear (1955)
In the 1950s, the entire world was living in fear, and for good reason – the Second World War was still recent enough in the collective memory to have scarred many who lived through it, and the rise of various political ideologies was only creating more tensions between nations, with the world seeming to be…
The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
Human nature is a strange concept – despite having been a subject of study since around the time we gained consciousness in the earliest days of the antiquity, no one has ever been able to offer a succinct and clear definition of what it means to be human, or why we are arguably the dominant…
A Dirty Shame (2004)
Like many of the contemporary audiences who have a taste for the alternative forms of filmmaking, I absolutely adore John Waters and his films, finding his brand of off-kilter comedy and complete commitment to providing glimpses into the limits of human decency through entirely eviscerating every notion of good taste we hold to be true…
The Postmodern Pelican 