As far as counterculture icons go, Anita Pallenberg is certainly one of the most fascinating, despite not being as widely known or revered as some of her peers. Someone whose career path was as layered and complicated as her ancestry, she was Italian-born of German parents, and who spent almost her entire life oscillating between…
Category: documentary
Mister Organ (2022)
It seems that every time I discuss a film that focuses around conspiracies or investigations around the ambiguities of everyday life, Thomas Pynchon’s famous quip in Bleeding Edge that “paranoia is the garlic in life’s kitchen – you can never have too much” comes into the conversation at some point. Perhaps overused, it is still…
Bobi Wine: The People’s President (2023)
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of people living under an authoritarian regime: there are those who just blindly accept that this is the way their lives have to be, and then there are those who stand up and fight in some way, even if it is only launching their own small, intimate rebellion against…
Will & Harper (2024)
Behind every massively successful comedic actor, there is usually a brilliant writer who works closely with them to help develop material. Very rarely do we find comedians being entirely independent when it comes to producing work – even if they craft their own material, there is usually someone who assists in shepherding those ideas or…
Land Without Bread (1933)
Where does one even start with a discussion on Land Without Bread, the ambitious and deeply unnerving documentary by Luis Buñuel? This isn’t to suggest that this is the kind of unimpeachable masterpiece that renders the viewer speechless (although this is certainly not untrue, for reasons we will discuss momentarily – it is one of…
20 Days in Mariupol (2023)
For some filmmakers, documentaries are an opportunity to take a subject that they find fascinating and explore it to either entertain or inform, if not both. For others, it’s an opportunity to learn more about a particular topic that they believe should be seen by a wider audience. Then there are those filmmakers who see…
Mur Murs (1981)
One of the most fascinating and vibrant fields of contemporary language studies falls under the branch of sociolinguistics and is usually referred to by the term “linguistic landscapes”, a simple but effective way of describing one of the most exciting areas of research of the past few decades. This field is built on the principle…
Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
While we have grown steadily enamoured with his gloomy existential charm and tendency to veer towards the nihilistic and volatile aspects of humanity and its place in the natural world, we often tend to forget that Werner Herzog is one of the most surprisingly compassionate, humane filmmakers of his generation. It may not always be…
The Eternal Memory (2023)
We all long to find that one person with whom we are able to spend the rest of our lives. Whether or not one subscribes to the idea of soulmates, there is some value in the idea of encountering that specific individual that is our perfect match, or at least as close to it as…
Lost in La Mancha (2002)
There is such a narrow boundary between tenacity and being annoyingly persistent – when it comes to Terry Gilliam, figuring out which one best describes his journey to making The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the distinction between the two is not easy to make out, and really depends on who you speak to, since…
The Postmodern Pelican 