He may not be making films as often as he was before (in the last five years, he’s made one film and a television miniseries, a far cry from his more prolific period where we were getting a new project around once a year), but Xavier Dolan remains one of the most talented directors of…

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard”, an adage that many of us are familiar with, and which tends to be used to describe any work of art that tackles life’s greatest inevitability with even the most vaguely comedic approach. We often find that humour tends to be a very effective way of exploring death and…

It was Leo Tolstoy who famously wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its way”, and if you looked at the Quincy family, an affluent clan that has lived in the idyllic New England hamlet of Corinth for centuries, you’ll find very few families quite as miserable. Having lost all…

There are some topics that are considered too risky to write about when it comes to film or television, since they very rarely tend to manifest as well as they should, which is precisely the reason why they’re actively avoided unless they are made by someone with the firsthand experience to be able to infuse…

“There are a great deal of a great many kinds of love.” The above is one of the many poetic musings we find in the writings of Lytton Strachey, a writer who is not as well-regarded today as he was a few decades previously, but where his work is still adored by many who find…

“All of life is a stage”, a sentiment that has become the unofficial motto of an entire industry, with theatre performers being drawn to the idea that life, in general, is a performance, a chance to play a character on an enormous stage, populated by myriad characters and a neverending stream of unexpected scenarios. Michael…

One of the most universal experiences is the challenges that come with navigating that space between adolescence and adulthood, a time in our lives when we are first trying to discover who we are and what our future will hopefully be, all the while handling major emotional and psychological changes that can be daunting and…

We all know how much cinema adores a good historical story, with the very origins of Hollywood being rooted in historical epics and period pieces that aimed to transport us to a different time and place, giving us the chance to sample from the people who preceded us. It has become a genre so saturated,…

Despite having flourished into one of the most acclaimed and arguably inventive filmmakers of her generation, Claire Denis has always been quite a reflective filmmaker, someone whose work is driven by her memories and experiences of the past. The majority of her most celebrated films tend to be examinations of postcolonial Africa, which comes from…

There was a time when Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were considered the heirs apparent to the role of greatest social realist filmmakers, their work being the gold standard for films about the lives of ordinary people navigating challenging circumstances, each one reflecting deeper conversations on the nature of life and death and everything in between….