Crime doesn’t pay, but it does help with the bills – a sentiment that is often the foundation of many works of art that endeavour to look at the trials and tribulations of ordinary citizens who find themselves in a situation where they have to resort to criminal activity, whether it is to make a…

It’s quite rare to find contemporary filmmakers who seem to be reinventing themselves, as well as their medium, with every new film they make. Jessica Hausner has been working for nearly a quarter of a century, the majority of that time spent in the proverbial shadows, making solid films that are not widely seen. It…

Despite having been working consistently on both film and television for around two decades, it has only been in the last couple of years that we have found Mike White to be getting the recognition he deserves – an artist with the ambition of a great independent filmmaker and the vaguely deranged mind of someone…

If there is one subject that art loves more than any other, it would be love – there is even a theory that the impetus that absolutely any work of art can be traced back to being about romance in some form, even if only slightly. However, much like any subject, the more popular it…

Freedom is one of those concepts that seems easy to define, but the moment one starts to offer a thorough explanation, it becomes clear it is much more difficult to pinpoint exactly what it entails since it is often a cyclical concept that is singularly impossible to entirely comprehend coherently. This is what director Rodrigo…

By the time he reached the mid-1980s, Pedro Almodóvar already had three mildly successful but widely appreciated comedies and several short films, which made him a name recognized by those with a penchant for alternative art, specifically within his native Spain, where he came to be known as someone of a high-level provocateur, but someone…

When it comes to bad films, something that is not often discussed in much detail is that, if one waits long enough, even the worst films tend to have some kind of critical re-evaluation, even if it is small and restricted to quite a limited group of individuals. Every film considered the worst will be…

Satire may take on many different forms, but there are generally two major ways to categorize it as a form of artistic expression – there are those satires in which the purpose is made quite clear and those that use allegory to the point where the viewer may need additional context to fully unpack the…

There is something magical that occurs when a cultural critic decides to step away from their podium and instead pursues the kind of work that they previously endeavoured to critique and discuss from afar. In the case of Cord Jefferson and his directorial debut American Fiction proved to be one of the most successful and…

Some filmmakers are so historically resonant, that the very mention of their name seems to be an assurance of the quality of what we are about to see. When it comes to Satyajit Ray, few filmmakers have been more worthy of being cited as the most important to ever come from their country as him,…