Over the years, I’ve spoken openly about how certain female filmmakers were revolutionary, particularly those that worked in decades when film was even more dominated by men than it is today. Gender politics have been an enormous part of Hollywood culture, and it is an issue that is slowly being resolved, but not nearly fast…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Silent Wedding (2008)
The death of Joseph Stalin in 1952 was a monumental event for a number of very obvious reasons, and has been engraved into the historical canon in a multitude of ways. However, some of the most interesting stories of this fateful day aren’t found in history books, but rather through the first-hand testimonials of the…
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
It doesn’t take an expert to realize that the films of Yasujirō Ozu tend to follow familiar patterns – the majority of them focus on working-class Japanese citizens in various cities around the country, coming to terms with their own personal quandaries in the years preceding or following the Second World War, which wrought irrevocable…
Winter’s Bone (2010)
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young woman living in rural Missouri. Her mother suffers from chronic illness, and her father has seemingly abandoned his family, with the suspicion being that he has returned to his life of crime. However, this turns out to be more than a problem when the family is visited by…
It Can’t Be! (1975)
Russian comedy is certainly a very strange phenomenon, for a number of reasons. The first time we encounter it, we might think that it’s a bit of a contradiction, since there is a quality of seriousness that is often associated with the country, with most of the more prominent Russian films known internationally often being…
The Human Voice (2021)
There are some artists who inspire excitement and endless anticipation when they announce a new project, regardless of what it may be. Pedro Almodóvar has been the gold standard for European filmmaking (and essentially the entire arthouse as a whole) for most of his career, which reached a crescendo in the 1990s, when he was…
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Few films define the 1950s better than Sweet Smell of Success, which is quite bizarre in retrospect, considering how reviled it was at the time. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick (who had mostly found success across the pond with a series of very successful British comedies), the film was considered an enormous failure when it premiered,…
Rabbit Hole (2010)
There are very few reasons to not find Rabbit Hole to be an incredibly compelling and worthwhile film. Coming in at a neat 91-minutes, John Cameron Mitchell has turned the acclaimed stage play by David Lindsay-Abaire into a powerful drama about grief that hits hard and leaves us reeling in emotions in how it explores…
The Woman in the Window (2021)
A mantra that I hold very dear is that if a film can’t be good, the next best thing is for it to be camp. This certainly is a good starting point for The Woman in the Window, which is the kind of pulpy, trashy thriller that peaked in the early 1990s, and rarely managed…
Pauline at the Beach (1983)
What is most interesting about the films of Éric Rohmer is that they are simultaneously beautifully simple, but somehow manage to still compress multitudes of ideas and themes into the most straightforward representation of life the viewer is bound to see, derived from his work alongside many other French filmmakers that set out to reflect…
The Postmodern Pelican 