“This ain’t no nostalgia show…we’re going to try something different” When it comes to music biographies, we seem to have run the gamut – we’ve had traditional recountings of the lives of famous artists, and more subversive attempts to portray the rise and fall of some of our greatest musicians. It seemed almost inevitable that…

When we look at them critically, there’s nothing quite like an artist’s mind. In order to be creative, one needs to possess some kind of madness, even if it is one that is borne from obsession with a particular subject. We all create art for different reasons, some having more motivation to do so than…

I Love Lucy isn’t just an iconic comedy show, it was an absolute institution. One simply cannot read any analysis on the history of television without this particular programme being mentioned, whether it be for its enormous viewership that put modern shows to shame, or its enduring legacy as one of the most important pieces…

If you have never heard the name Antonio Ligabue, you are not alone. Despite being an incredibly gifted artist whose talents seemingly knew no bounds, his life was notoriously plagued with personal problems, with his physical ailments preventing him from leading a functional life in pre-war Italy, and his mental disorders being the cause of…

Towards the end of Hamsun, the ambitious biographical drama of Knut Hamsun, an iconic Norwegian writer and early proponent of Adolf Hitler’s ideologies, a doctor remarks that he is looking forward to encountering “the anatomy of a poet”, through his continued observations of the titular character as part of state-mandated proceedings in the effort to…

Let’s talk about Cleopatra, Cecil B. DeMille’s ambitious attempt to capture the life and times of one of history’s most enigmatic figures on screen. This is a film brimming with historical inaccuracies (with screenwriters  Waldemar Young and Vincent Lawrence, and the film’s resident researcher and compiler of information, Bartlett Cormack, choosing to forego correct chronology…

It’s not often that we find a film with as ambitious a premise as One Night in Miami succeeding in realizing its full potential. Inarguably, when it was first announced that Regina King (who is undeniably one of the finest actresses of her generation) would be making her feature directorial debut after years of working…

54 is a wild fever-dream of a film – a lavish, surreal journey into one of New York City’s most notorious nightclubs that holds the viewer captive and shows us around a deranged disco where nothing quite makes sense, although this doesn’t really matter. Whether or not 54 is a particularly good film isn’t all…

Very few artists were able to capture the wide-ranging milieu of the United States during the twentieth century more than August Wilson, whose Pittsburgh Cycle remains one of the most daring explorations of the last one-hundred years in American history. Gradually, these stories have made their way to film, mainly due to the efforts of…

Anyone who adores Hollywood history was undoubtedly clamouring to see what David Fincher was going to concoct when it was announced that his next project (his first in over half a decade, and the one directly following his reinvention of the psychological thriller with Gone Girl) would be Mank, based on a screenplay written by…