“We didn’t solve anything – we just picked up the pieces” Perception is an important part of understanding a film, which has never been clearer than in those that blur the boundaries not only between genres, but between entire conceptual frameworks. Basil Dearden’s Sapphire is one that can be seen in two ways – the…

When it comes to going with the most simple approach with filmmaking, Hollywood took a while to adjust, especially during the era in which cinema was still quite new and revolutionary, and every film was considered to be a crucial step towards normalizing it as the dominant form of literature in a world slowly being…

Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) has only known peculiarity – named after a homeless man who came into a large fortune, her life has been anything but conventional. It doesn’t help that her parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) have made a living as con artists, with their livelihood coming in fleecing any unsuspecting victim,…

What do you get when you combine Nicolas Cage at the peak of his descent into over-acting (and his gradual realization of his reputation, and the subsequent relishing in it), Willem Dafoe at his most excessive and Paul Schrader’s unhinged vision of crime and violence? The answer is Dog Eat Dog, the bewildering dark comedy…

John (Willem Dafoe) doesn’t have much direction in life – he’s in the throes of middle-age, and all he’s known as been drugs. He used to be an addict, but has now gotten clean, but still does work as a dealer and delivery man for Ann (Susan Sarandon), his glamorous supplier, who services the elite…

Mrs Wong (Tsai Chin), more commonly known as Nai-Nai (“grandmother”) is an ordinary elderly, chain-smoking immigrant woman residing in the Chinatown neighbourhood of New York City. She has been widowed for some years, and as a result has passed the time engaging in a variety of activities, such as weekly consultations with a fortune-teller and…

Seijun Suzuki is a filmmaker whose work has always impressed and terrified me in equal measure – while his methods as a director seem perfectly-calibrated to the abstract approach that has become acceptable in the Japanese film industry in the past few decades, looking at his work from the perspective of the time in which…

Whatever it was that compelled Georges Franju to make Judex, it worked out remarkably well, as he put together one of the most fascinating crime films of the 1960s, and a work that still holds up as a remarkable piece of alternative French filmmaking that essentially defined the director’s entire career and made him one…

Phillip Corey (James Stephenson) is a wealthy tradesman who conducts his business between his home in San Francisco and China, amassing an immense fortune and acquiring many enemies along the way. This manifests in his murder, which the police initially attribute to suicide until it becomes clear that there was some foul play involved. In…

There’s a moment early in Capone where the titular character stands on a small boat in a body of water somewhere in Florida, curses at an alligator for stealing the fish he was trying to reel in, and subsequently shoots it, resulting in the water turning a bright shade of red, accompanied by a bevvy…