For some inexplicable reason, Denys Arcand is a filmmaker whose name is not widely known, despite his work being exceptionally strong. He has a small group of devoted followers but has mainly remained quite under the radar outside of his native Canada, which seems like quite an unfortunate turn of events, especially considering he is…

Hell hath no fury like an independent filmmaker scorned. Hollywood has always demonstrated a preference towards certain themes, and none are more adored than stories about the film industry itself. If you take any random assortment of around a dozen films, it is likely at least one of them will be situated in an arts…

He may be a director who works quite infrequently, and his output is often seen as divisive at best, but Hal Hartley is one of those filmmakers whose entire career embodies the spirit of pure independence. One of the pioneers of the movement towards more small-scale, arthouse-inspired productions, he has been celebrated as one of…

Reality is often stranger than fiction, and few contemporary filmmakers understand this better than Todd Haynes, who has made a career from taking inspiration from real-life figures or entire periods in the past and repurposing them into masterful examinations of the human condition, each one beautifully handcrafted by a director who has consistently proven his…

Being in any kind of relationship can be hard work – and it’s even more difficult when your recently deceased partner returns from the dead as a reanimated corpse, completely oblivious to the fact that she had supposedly crossed into the ultimate inevitability, returning as a result of some otherworldly occurrence that begins to sweep…

If you happened to be in New York City around 2016 (or at least were aware of the shows that were being produced around the time), and had a penchant for theatre of the absurd, you likely encountered F***ing Identical Twins, a two-man show written and performed by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, who put…

When one is accused of murder, the logical response is to plead innocence and hope that there is evidence that supports this claim, regardless of whether or not the crime was actually committed by the likely suspect. However, some would view a murder trial as being beneficial to their career, especially when it brings them…

You can accuse Mel Brooks of many different artistic misdemeanours – an actor who has a tendency towards ham, someone who is always focused on getting a laugh even when it isn’t quite fitting, or simply that he always tends to go slightly too far on nearly every occasion. Yet, we adore him for these…

The era of New Hollywood brought so many exciting and revolutionary changes to the film industry, and one of my personal favourite developments of this more laissez-faire approach to filmmaking was the ability for stories to be a lot darker than they ever were before. There were still standards, and directors and writers were still…

Author’s Note: This is the final entry into our four-part series in which we are exploring Wes Anderson’s short films based on the collected short stories by Roald Dahl. While these reviews are as independent of each other as the films, they still exist in dialogue with one another, so for the sake of consistency,…