“What is cinema? Light coming from somewhere captured by images more or less colourful” These are the concluding words to the penultimate scene of Agnès Varda’s incredible visual essay, the documentary The Beaches of Agnès (French: Les plages d’Agnès). I have been an admirer of Varda for an incredibly long time, and one of her…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Room (2003)
There are great films. There are good films. There are mediocre films. There are bad films. There are terrible films. There are films. Then there’s The Room. There is just something about this film that proves to make it one of the most sincere and unintentional masterpieces in cinema history. There is very little doubt…
Kill, Baby, Kill (1966)
There are very few directors who captivate audiences on a variety of sensory levels, but Mario Bava stands above everyone else in this regard. His films are incredibly beautiful and deeply meaningful. He is one of the most fascinating filmmakers of the era he helped define, and he made some truly influential films. The one…
Naked (1993)
I first saw Mike Leigh’s Naked in August 2012. I originally wrote my review after watching it for the third time in 2014. It was a film that would grow to be my favorite piece of cinema ever made. To this day, I have always looked at my early reviews with a mixture of nostalgic…
Fox and His Friends (1975)
A little while ago, I watched Satan’s Brew (German: Satansbraten). It was, in my personal opinion, one of the lowest moments in the professional career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a filmmaker I have grown to be tremendously interested in. This film came only two years after one of the most extraordinary films I have ever…
Manhattan (1979)
Woody Allen has made some of the greatest comedy films of all time, regardless of his few failures. One of his most towering achievements in Manhattan, a film that I have loved for a very long time, but only after watching it upon my return to the titular city did my opinion of this magnificent…
The Lost City of Z (2017)
We just don’t get good adventure films anymore. There are several films every year that feature adventure and exploration, but none of them are faithful to the sub-genre where a group of people ventures off into an unknown land, on perilous and dangerous, but still exciting, adventures. These kinds of films, such as The African…
Their Finest (2017)
I truly am a sucker for a good period drama, especially one taking place during the Second World War, one of the most fascinating periods in modern history. Of the year’s best films is undeniably Dunkirk, a frank and beautifully poetic war epic about one of the most extraordinarily fascinating moments of the war. Another…
Lost in Paris (2017)
Sometimes the best movies are the ones you weren’t expecting, or perhaps hadn’t even heard of. One of the best films of the year is undoubtedly Lost in Paris (French: Paris pieds nus), a whimsical and brilliantly constructed comedy that wants nothing more than for the audience to have fun, and while many films may…
Love and Death (1975)
It may be easy to deride him for his overly prolific career that results in his fair share of dismal failures, but I do think Woody Allen is one of the most extraordinary filmmakers of all time. To remind of his true genius, I’ve decided to do a retrospective on the decade I believe represents…
The Postmodern Pelican 