The contributions Charles Chaplin made to cinema can never be underestimated – whether in his early days as one of the most prominent stars of the early Hollywood era, to his later years as an established filmmaker in his own right, Chaplin’s work was always impeccable and made by someone who had a genuine fondness…

America – the land of the free, home of the brave, and the country of seemingly endless opportunities. For about as long as the United States of America has been an entity, there have been people from all around the world that have flocked to the nation, seeing it as a safe haven in which…

They often say that comedians are very adept at horror, since they understand the dark places from which humour comes from better than most. However, we can also invert this idea and see whether it is applicable from the other way around – can those more well-versed in horror make effective comedies? One person who…

There are very few filmmakers bold enough to make a film like Chi-Raq as Spike Lee, a director whose entire career has been defined by his willingness to push the envelope in ways that we had never seen before. Never afraid of controversy, since he knew what he was doing was for the greater good,…

As a theme, desire has been explored in a multitude of ways throughout the history of art – it is perhaps even more distinct than representations of romance, with many artists across every conceivable medium viewing the concept of love as entailing a combination of emotional connection and carnal cravings. It has become an incredibly…

While their status as wildly inventive auteurs of the American independent arthouse may be almost entirely consolidated now as a result of their last few films, there was a time when Josh and Benny Safdie were two amateur filmmakers that weren’t particularly well-regarded, working in the deepest recesses of the mumblecore sub-genre. Their steady rise…

In a quote that is often evoked when the subject of belief is brought up, Karl Marx so boldly called religion “the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions”, which has often been appropriated as the source…

It seems almost absurd that Preston Sturges continuously fades into the background when we are talking on the subject of greatest filmmakers to ever work in the genre of comedy. Much like his contemporaries Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, Sturges was a filmmaker with a clear authorial vision, which extended beyond him being merely a…

Every now and then, we encounter a film where the very act of simply starting the conversation is a challenge. Owen Kline’s directorial debut, Funny Pages, certainly matches the description, being a work of singular vision that defies logic, and instead goes in pursuit of something much deeper – and figuring out precisely what it…

If there had been a scenario where David Lynch was tasked to make a contemporary riff on This is Spinal Tap, chances are that it would look very similar to The Nowhere Inn, the absolutely ingenious and brilliantly subversive satire that was directed by Bill Benz, who was essentially standing in service to Annie Clark…