Florence (Greta Gerwig) is a young woman in Los Angeles working for the affluent Greenberg family, helping them with daily errands and being an invaluable presence in their lives. However, they’re going on an extended vacation to Vietnam, which means Florence’s responsibilities will be temporarily put on hold – that is until she meets Roger…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Lighthouse (2019)
“There is enchantment in the light” Robert Eggers may have broken film criticism – not because he made a perfect film, but rather one that is singularly impossible to fully encapsulate in any amount of words. It’s difficult to figure out precisely where to start when talking about The Lighthouse – this is a brilliant…
Judy (2019)
Judy is an anomaly of a film. On one hand, it’s a run-of-the-mill entertainment biopic that doesn’t venture out of the taut thematic territory we’ve come to expect from these kinds of films. On the other hand, it’s a remarkably restrained portrayal of one of the most famous entertainers to ever live, executed with a…
Give Me Liberty (2019)
Vic (Chris Galust) is a young man working as a medical transport driver, who is in charge of retrieving various patients from their homes and taking them to various places, such as the hospital or their places of work. On one particular day, he isn’t able to do his job as intended, mainly because everything…
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a young painter in the 1770s who is sent to a remote manor in Brittany at the request of a wealthy countess (Valeria Golino), who commissions her to paint a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). This presents itself as a bit of a challenge, as the young woman is…
The Two Popes (2019)
There are really only two ways you can watch The Two Popes – you can see it as either an innocuous attempt at humanizing two larger-than-life figures or as a well-meaning comedy about two men working through a very difficult relationship. In fact, both perspectives are entirely valid, and perfectly describe this film, one of…
Cats (2019)
“I remember the time I knew what happiness was” – “Memory”, Cats Look what the cat dragged in: utter garbage. There are few things I regret more in my life than watching Cats. I do wonder when Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the cinematograph, that they knew that their work would one day result in…
7 Reasons to Run Away from Society (2019)
The best way to describe 7 Reasons to Run Away from Society, the gloriously deranged anthology film directed by Esteve Soler, Gerard Quinto and David Torras, is as Monty Python coming into contact with Pedro Almodóvar. Longtime readers will know that when it comes to my personal taste, I hold very few creatives in as…
So Long, My Son (2020)
Somewhere in rural China in the early 1980s, we’re presented with two working-class families residing near a factory, which served as their main source of income for breadwinners Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Yingming (Xu Chen), who are raising their children with their respective wives, Liyun (Yong Mei) and Haiyan (Ai Liya). Their sons share the…
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
In a cinematic landscape that thrived on the constant repetition of the same set of tired ideas, David O. Russell stood firm in his belief that cinema could be original without resorting to successful, but derivative, conventions. In fact, he managed to demonstrate that filmmaking didn’t even need to make much sense overall, as evident…
The Postmodern Pelican 