Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is near the end of eighth grade, on her way to high school. She is charming, funny and intelligent, but also deeply insecure and crushed by inextricable loneliness. She has very few friends, if any, and the only other person who seems to notice her existence is her father, Mark (Josh…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Hotel Artemis (2018)
For a community that thrives on the adoration of abstract images and the odd stories they tend to tell, the cinephile community is filled with hypocrites, especially from those that normally take a more elitist point of view. One can’t go a day without hearing someone lament about how the modern film industry is over-run…
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
I have a very difficult relationship with Wes Anderson. There are times when I wake up and consider him one of the most audacious voices in modern filmmaking, an essential visual artist who doesn’t make films – he composes them. There are other times when I think he is nothing more than a filmmaker who…
Leave No Trace (2018)
Debra Granik is a great filmmaker. While not necessarily the most prolific film director, having only directed three feature films (and working on several fiction and non-fiction films in some capacity), she has shown herself to be a remarkably talented artist. This review is concerned with her most recent work of art, the astonishing Leave…
Private Life (2018)
At the beginning of Private Life, the new film from Tamara Jenkins, we are introduced to Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), who are the quintessential artistic couple – he is a theatrical genius known for avant-garde productions, and she is a highly-acclaimed writer whose first book is about to be published after years…
The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
They just don’t make horror films like they used to anymore. Not to imply that considerably original work isn’t being done in horror cinema today, but that there was a time when horror was, dare I say, warm and endearing. The British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s had a certain elegant charm that…
Le Bonheur (1965)
Agnès Varda is an institution. She is a filmmaker who made films before, during and after the French New Wave. She is, by that very rationale, the epitomical figure of the French New Wave – and considering she was one of a few women in a cinematic movement almost entirely controlled by men, her films…
Rumble Fish (1983)
The 1980s were a strange time for American filmmaking. There were some excellent films produced during that decade (however, considering the two best American films of that era were made by foreigners, it is quite an anomaly). Quite significantly, some filmmakers that had previously made towering masterpieces in the 1960s and 1970s started to become…
Mandy (2018)
Well, where do we begin? As shameful as it is to say, I don’t think I’ve got the words that can appropriately describe Mandy, the latest film from the obscurely brilliant Panos Cosmatos. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but considering the director’s previous work, Beyond the Black Rainbow was a work…
The Children Act (2018)
Life is a precious thing – regardless of what you believe, I think we can all appreciate the fact that life is something to be cherished – but there is something else that governs life in many instances that is often extremely important, as well as extremely divisive: the right to choose. This is the…
The Postmodern Pelican 