While his name is now synonymous with a very particular kind of reliable independent cinema that offers exactly what it promises and doesn’t always inspire much passion outside of potentially having some intriguing narrative elements, and which are mostly adherent to the kind of star-studded, lightweight dramas and quirky comedies that speak to the neuroses…
Category: Drama
Harvest (2025)
History tends to be presented to us in a form that is either nostalgic or heroic – whether it’s the valour of soldiers on the battlefield, or the beauty of the simpler existences lived by those in a time when we weren’t so preoccupied with modern problems. What we don’t often see – and for…
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970)
Life has never been easy for people like Junie Moon and her friends, who decide to check out of the hospital in which they have been residents for a while, and take up the challenge of starting their own home – Junie is a victim of a vicious acid attack that has left most of…
Colours of Time (2025)
The inherent challenge that comes with assessing the past is that there is simply so much of it – even by the time you’ve read this very sentence, it can be considered a historical remnant, an action that only exists in the past tense. This has led history to be viewed as stodgy and immovable,…
Le Lac (2025)
There is a quote by the master storyteller Herman Melville in his timeless classic Moby Dick that I absolutely adore: “As for me, I am tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”, which is a beautiful and evocative description of the desire to…
Drive Back Home (2025)
When starting this discussion, I wanted to find a quote that best described the core themes of the film we’ll be exploring. I considered the profoundly philosophical and deeply moving, before settling on one that I feel best describes the core themes, which is taken from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where she simply states, “what…
Rebuilding (2025)
Life can change in a moment, and there’s nothing we can do about the unpredictable nature of reality – and in many cases, it’s difficult not feel like you have been dealt a bad hand, where even your best efforts can fall apart at the seams. However, as they often say, it’s not the reason…
Preparation for the Next Life (2025)
How fast do you have to run to truly escape your past? This is a question that has been posed in many different ways over the centuries, with the idea of disappearing into the ether and starting anew in entirely different places being a theme that has fascinated artists for generations. It is also a…
I Only Rest in the Storm (2025)
In the early 1970s, Tom Zé released an album that featured a particular song, “O Riso e a Faca” – it’s not widely considered one of his most famous compositions, nor one that is regularly discussed beyond the occasional mention. Despite this, the message at the heart of the song (the title translating as “the…
Souleymane’s Story (2025)
There are few subjects today that stir up quite as much discourse as that of immigration, and it seems like the conversation around the people that seek refuge in supposedly “developed” countries will always undoubtedly devolve into ferocious arguments about the need to preserve a culture and its people, as if many of these countries…
The Postmodern Pelican 