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…

The name Roberto Rossellini evokes many different images, very few of them having anything to do with comedy. He was not a director known for making lighthearted films, instead being one of the formative voices in the Italian neo-realist movement, which saw him addressing the postwar period through an array of gritty, direct dramas that…

After many years of honing his craft as one of the most creative and reliable directors of music videos (an artform he helped define), Jonathan Glazer took the leap into long-form filmmaking, in the form of Sexy Beast, his feature-length directorial debut. He may have only made three films to date, but each one of…

No one writes women quite like Pedro Almodóvar, at least not anyone who has been working in the medium of film in the last forty years. From his earliest days of subversive, darkly comical morality tales that took him to the furthest corners of society, to the present moment where he has engaged with many…

While his name has come to be associated with a range of prestige dramas and well-constructed comedies, there was a time when François Ozon was more known for his transgressive, boundary-pushing films that were the embodiment of bad taste in a way that no one else of his generation seemed willing to work. This is…