An important question that we often need to ask is whether we can excuse a deeply flawed film based on the value of its message. Objectively, the answer should be resoundingly negative, since art should not be judged more leniently based on the ideas that went into its creation. Unfortunately, we don’t like in a…

It is generally agreed almost universally that Preston Sturges was one of the greatest writers and directors to work during Hollywood’s Golden Age – and when discussing someone whose peers and collaborators include the likes of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, it is clear that we are looking at someone quite special. He made several…

The social and political history of Portugal is fascinating, but also not widely known outside of those who come from the country or make up part of its extensive global diaspora. However, it is extremely difficult to find a work produced in the 20th century (or even to the present day) that doesn’t address the…

One of the more unconventional tragic figures in the history of literature is Heinrich von Kleist, a marginally well-known poet and writer whose most notable contribution to the culture was actually his suicide – not necessarily the act itself, but the journey he took towards ultimately ending his life, which was well-documented as being a…

By this point in this career, Hirokazu Kore-eda has done more than enough to prove himself as one of our greatest living filmmakers. In recent years, he has expanded on his own repertoire by stepping outside of his native Japan and looking at other countries, with his first film made in another language being the…

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…