The world of L. Frank Baum has been a part of our lives for over a century – and whether we were raised with the iconic 1939 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz or any of its other versions or works inspired by his magical writings, it has infiltrated the culture in many ways. One…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
An Angel at My Table (1990)
While it is logically implausible (since everyone needs to start somewhere), it has always seemed like Dame Jane Campion has been considered one of our finest filmmakers regardless of what stage of her career we are looking at – so imagining her being a young, rambunctious director that wasn’t the celebrated artist she is today…
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Over the past fifteen years (slightly more if you were one of the forward-thinking viewers who leapt onto his wavelength earlier in his career), Yorgos Lanthimos has steadily risen from the depths of the Greek Weird Wave to the status as one of the most genuinely exciting, talented filmmakers of his generation, and someone who…
The Piano Lesson (2024)
Few playwrights evoke such passionate discourse and praise when their names are mentioned, with this status being reserved for a select few artists who changed the way theatre functions, either narratively, in form or as a combination of both. August Wilson lived a comparatively short life when we look at it from a distance, but…
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
When an artist has been in the industry for long enough, it’s a challenge to not divide their career into different chapters, especially when their style and approach to filmmaking shifts over time. Not necessarily aligned with quality, but more in how they develop their ideas and the kinds of subjects that they pursue at…
The Room Next Door (2024)
Death is a subject that has been explored from every conceivable angle, but yet we are no closer to understanding its nuances or nature than we were at the dawn of humanity. This has only added to the complexity of dealing with the topic since death is perhaps the only universal inevitability, yet no one…
A Day in the Country (1946)
After having quite a prolific career in both Europe and the United States, and having made films quite late into his life, it’s tough to imagine that Jean Renoir, one of cinema’s finest directors, had many instances of projects that didn’t manifest as he intended them to, most of his work being well-crafted and very…
We Live in Time (2024)
We tend to view life as a single stream of events, occurring in linear time and aiming to reach a particular destination – and the fact that we are obsessed with chronology to the point where we tend to focus on every unit of time. The great irony of this universal tendency is that in…
Gladiator II (2024)
They tend to say that once you’ve achieved perfection, it’s best to leave it alone. However, the same principle doesn’t necessarily apply when you’ve made something perfectly decent and solid enough to withstand the test of time, but perhaps not necessarily redefine a particular genre or style of filmmaking. Ridley Scott has made many films…
Hot Saturday (1932)
Discussions about the Pre-Code era are certainly not elusive around these parts. This period of Hollywood history is one of the most fascinating, since that brief period between the silent era and the implementation of the Hays Code was home to some of the most boundary-pushing, daring works, the likes of which we wouldn’t see…
The Postmodern Pelican 