When I opted to watch First Man, I was doing it for a number of reasons: my loyalty towards Damien Chazelle, who I find to be a massively talented filmmaker (and one that, despite the criticisms of his detractors, has not come close to peaking yet, even if his breakthrough moments with Whiplash and La…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Dispersed Clouds (1951)
Dispersed Clouds is the kind of film that makes me truly appreciate cinema – a small and intimate social drama that has an explosively powerful message at its core and an execution that understands the human condition with incredible profundity, a film that always does more than it says and ends up being a magnificent…
Scorpio Rising (1963)
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” ~ Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” In the history of experimental cinema, very…
The Tall Guy (1989)
A few years ago, when I was still a cinematic neophyte, I was at a second-hand bookstore and I found a book entitled Variety: Comedy Movies, a collection of capsule reviews written by the critics of Variety over the course of a few decades. At the age of only about thirteen, I didn’t care too…
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
Gus Van Sant is as diverse a director as you can get because he has shown himself to be capable of making astonishing films and films so bad, they transcend the concept of mediocrity and become something unbearable. His most recent film, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is somewhere in between, and…
Slice (2018)
Kingfisher is an ordinary town in the suburban Midwest. It is filled with hard-working folks who toil day in and day out to provide for their families in their working-class American lives. Kingfisher also just happens to be the most haunted town in America, and in an effort to allow the living and dead to…
The Land of Steady Habits (2018)
When your life is falling apart and nothing seems to be working out, how do you find the motivation to pick up the pieces and put it all back together? This is the focus of the newest from indie film virtuoso Nicole Holofcener, The Land of Steady Habits, a very funny comedy about some very…
A Star Is Born (2018)
The cinematic event of the year is undeniably A Star Is Born – it is a film that has taken the world by surprise, and surpassed every expectation put upon the third remake of a classic film. A great deal has been written about this film – many have mentioned how A Star Is Born…
Loulou (1980)
Loulou is a great film, a formal romantic masterpiece that sees director Maurice Pialat abandoning the stylistic pretensions of the French New Wave for something brutal, raw and visceral, a beautifully-constructed drama set in the dingy apartments and overcrowded bars of Paris and surrounds, as we watch the inner psychological workings of three core characters,…
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
You have to admire the sheer gall of Orson Welles – who else would dare become so dissatisfied with the limits of William Shakespeare’s work to go ahead and write their own versions of Shakespeare’s stories, using the Bard’s historically-resonant plays as a framework for their own vain lamentations of the reign of brutes and…
The Postmodern Pelican 