Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson) is a young man who is lost in a world he doesn’t quite understand. He’s the self-professed “King of Staten Island”, based on his upbringing in the titular New York City borough, which he considers to be one of the most singularly uninteresting places in the country, yearning to get out,…

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” – no one truly knows where this popular adage comes from, but it been espoused by countless people across the decades, all of which remarks on the challenges that come with doing comedic work, and how it tends to be the most significant, but worthwhile challenge for any actor,…

Peter (Ladislav Jakim) is an aimless young man who seems to lack any sense of direction. He’s pressured by his parents (Jan Vostrčil and Božena Matušková) to get a job, particularly by his overbearing father, whose belief is that the only person worth any time is a working person and that one can’t truly be…

Louisa (Shirley MacLaine) is the world’s richest woman, she is willing to do absolutely anything to strip herself of that title. She was raised in comfortable poverty, and has always aspired to lead a very simple life, relying on nothing but the bare essentials – but as we see in the first few moments of…

“I do not think my adventure starts with a boy, I think it starts with me” These words appear at the beginning of How to Build a Girl, the ambitious new film by Coky Giedroyc, and her first feature in over twenty years. An audacious comedy in the vein of many similarly-themed coming-of-age stories that…

There’s something quite wonderful about Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Russian: Операция „Ы“ и другие приключения Шурика), a quality that appeals to my interests a lot more than I thought it would. I’ve been gradually exploring the depths of Soviet comedy over the past few years, finding a balance between the many defining masterpieces…

Not too many people speak about Richard Lester, which is surprising considering he is one of cinema’s most interesting directors, but unfortunately fell victim to the fact that, despite making numerous terrific films, never quite had an authorial voice in the same way many of his contemporaries tended to throughout their own careers. The result…

“She ate the bread of life to the last crumb” Madame Berthe (Sylvie) is an elderly woman who has just been left a widow after the death of her husband. Her children are naturally worried about their mother, who had devoted her entire life to her marriage and has suddenly been left without direction. She…

In looking at the history of women-focused cinema, there are few films that represent as seismic a shift into looking at female issues as George Cukor’s The Women, the 1939 adaptation of  Clare Boothe Luce’s revolutionary stage production of the same name. Cukor was one of the most influential directors of the Golden Age of…

Watching Taika Waititi rise from being an unheralded director of obscure independent comedies to one of the most sought-after directors working today has been an interesting experience, especially for those of us who have been devoted to his work since the earliest days of his career (the discovery of Eagle vs Shark is still one…