It is often said that in order to create good art centred around the concept of death, one has to be either fond enough of living to be entirely objective to the realities of this great inevitability, or so far gone into a space of almost nihilistic despair that this serves as a way for…

The first time I encountered So I Married an Axe Murderer was in my pre-teen years, when I stumbled upon it one late night on television. For someone who usually took films at face value, something to carry such a direct and evocative title was immediately going to be of interest, even if I had…

It may be a bold statement, but The Man with Two Brains could legitimately be the funniest film ever made. Rarely has there been a comedy that contains so much original humour that is presented at such a rapid pace, it almost becomes impossible to capture it all in a single viewing. Yet, Carl Reiner…

Horror is a genre in which some excellent work has been done to establish certain conventions over the years, as a result of the continuous popularity these films have enjoyed since the inception of cinema – even within the genre, we see many smaller subsets forming at an almost alarming rate, since every few years,…

Art has the ability to bring profound change, even if it is solely through the channel of provoking thought, which usually lead to spirited discussions about a range of vitally important issues. Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto tells the story of a young transgender woman growing up during an era of extreme social and political…

The sheer amount of stories that we’ve seen written about capitalism, either its joys or failures, is almost too staggering to count, especially since they extend to the very outset of the idea of free-market economy, which some viewed as being indicative of a new level of outright freedom, others seeing it as a way…

There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we just wish to freeze time, and run through the streets, liberated from the need to partake in a world that grows increasingly more hostile the more we uncover its secrets, which is one of the inevitabilities of venturing into adulthood. This concept is the centrepiece scene…

Purely on his contribution to the medium, Ralph Bakshi deserves to be considered one of the greatest animators in the history of cinema. His name may not be as well-known as some of his predecessors, contemporaries and artistic descendants, but his legacy has remained almost entirely untouched as possibly the most significant elder statesman of…

When it comes to making cinema that redefines the limits of artistic expression by filtering it through the most absurd and deranged stories imaginable, no one comes close to the work being done in Greece over the past two decades. Some of the most fascinating and provocative films have been produced by a range of…

For about as long as our species has been labouring, the workplace has bred a range of unlikable colleagues, whether it be incompetent co-workers or despotic managers. Art has never been afraid to point this out, normally in the form of more upbeat content that shows the day-to-day struggles of the ordinary working-class individual and…