History has always been ingrained in cinema in some form – whether retellings of the past or merely works set within specific periods, there has always been a strong sense of urgency when it comes to exploring the past to some degree. Historical films take many different forms, but one that I have personally grown…

The film industry has always had an obsession with the concept of spectacles – there is nothing quite as entertaining as a well-made, big-budget blockbuster, and while they have mostly defaulted to genres such as science fiction and superhero stories in recent years, there was a time when the biggest source of inspiration for these…

The cinematic landscape could truly benefit from having more directors like Nida Manzoor. We don’t often witness the immediate birth of such a promising young voice that emerges with little fanfare, but immediately is established as an essential talent that will define their generation of visual storytellers. In her feature directorial debut, after a few…

Part of the appeal of the New Hollywood movement was the tendency to push boundaries in a way that didn’t exist previously. If you look at the body of work produced during this time from a distance, you can see two broad categories of the films that were most successful – there were those that…

As is often the case with most great literature, the premise of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not original to the Bard, but rather taken from an ancient text, which he carefully appropriated to creatively hide the fact that this story of revenge and violence was not his own work (although the semantics of such situations…

At some point in the past few decades, Hollywood has seemingly lost the ability to make purely entertaining epics, and where every film of enormous scope feels like a major event that comes around very rarely, audiences often going years without witnessing a true spectacle that isn’t somehow tied to the recent influx of superhero…

Every year, when confronted with a flurry of remakes, reboots and revivals, someone will doubtlessly express the fact that Hollywood is running out of ideas, and that blockbusters are not allowed to be original anymore, or else they will struggle to turn a profit. Obviously, this is not a delusion, since we’ve seen so many…

As one of history’s greatest minds, Albert Einstein had many incredible ideas. One of his most famous statements comes in his 1935 collection of writings, The World As I See It, where the iconoclast boldly states “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the…

There comes a point where one needs to ask how many times can the same story be told before it becomes stale? In the past two decades, we have been witness to no less than three different instances of attempting to retell the Batman story, with this number growing even larger if we consider animated…

There are two genres of films that I think have managed to achieve the status of showcasing the full extent of what the human body is capable of doing. The first are the musicals produced during the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the lives of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and a wealth of…