Despite my better judgment, but I want to start this review with a personal story that bears great relevance to the subject of this review – it was 2014, and Bruce Springsteen was on his Wrecking Ball tour, taking his beautiful work around the world, including to my neck of the woods. It was a…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)
The last person on earth trope – one of the most adored subjects in the history of literature, television and film. Over the past few centuries, we have seen speculative fiction written on the subject of the apocalypse, where some situation results in the death of the entire human population, with the exception of one…
Widows (2018)
Steve McQueen has come to be seen as one of this generation’s finest auteurs, a highly-respected filmmaker who has been able to captivate audiences with his unique approach to storytelling and his remarkable technical prowess, most likely a remnant of his career as a visual artist before he went into narrative filmmaking. He achieved all…
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
There are a lot of reasons for us to revisit Rosemary’s Baby these days – we are living in a cinematic era where horror films have started to shift back to the more psychologically-inert days of fearful terror, with the focus being on the combination of human insecurities and anxieties and the otherworldly – and…
Lady Snowblood (1973)
“Revenge is a dish best served cold” – a cliched adage, but one that literature has held closely for centuries. The idea of wreaking havoc on the lives of those that previously wronged you has always been a ripe topic for many artists, and cinema, in particular, has always been facilitative to the revenge storyline….
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
In 1937, Leo McCarey made The Awful Truth, a delightful film I absolutely devoured and which instantly became one of my favourite screwball comedies. It was a warm, joyful and hilarious film that I truly adored for its marvellous sense of humour and its warmhearted storyline. That same year, McCarey made another film, Make Way…
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
There’s nothing quite like nostalgia, is there? The past few years have been defined with reboots of classic shows, comebacks from once-popular bands, and films that bear resemblance to the classics of yesteryear. Yet, very little can be better than the original product, and I’d much rather revisit something in its peak than watch as…
Candyman (1992)
Imagine this scene – a suburban living room about a decade ago, an ordinary Saturday evening. I was hardly a teenager at that point, and I was surrounded by a few of my equally-juvenile friends. One of us stares ominously into a mirror and recites “Bloody Mary”, a few times. The thrill and fearful panic…
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Things have a way of escalating out here in the West ~ Buster Scruggs Joel and Ethan Coen have had such varied careers, venturing across genres and cinematic conventions to bring us several wildly different stories throughout the course of their filmmaking endeavours, each of them being unique and wonderful in their own way….
Shirkers (2018)
I don’t know where to start – Shirkers is an absolutely astonishing film and something I was not expecting at all. When I heard about Sandi Tan’s documentary, I was anticipating an interesting but otherwise inconsequential, film about an unsolved mystery and a filmmaker in search of the answers that have eluded her for years,…
The Postmodern Pelican 