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….

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with a paramedic will know that it is a career path made for those who are not only physically at their peak, but also willing to handle the mental strain that comes with this profession. It’s quite obvious that saving lives can take a psychological toll on…

It’s always a peculiar experience to sit through a film that dramatizes events that you saw unfolding in real life since it almost feels redundant (and we often forget that films aren’t solely made for the present generation, but also for those that are still to come, with the contemporary dramas of today being the…