For about a decade, Justine Triet has been circling around being consolidated as one of the most promising young voices in contemporary European cinema – her work is incredibly layered and always very precise, and navigates the vague boundaries between humour and drama with such astonishing ease, it was only a matter of time before…

One knows they have written a truly brilliant piece of literature when the very title not only evokes a very specific kind of memory but has become something of a punchline when discussing the works it tends to define. When it comes to The Grapes of Wrath, few can argue against this being shorthand for…

When discussing Mike Leigh, we usually associate him with stories within the contemporary working class, deeply meditative and profoundly compelling social realist narratives that are firm reflections of the director’s origins within the movement popularly known as the “angry young men” of British cinema. However, he was prone to experimenting in many ways, and after…

Here’s an interesting question – who else could make a film that was abducted by the studio, and edited down to the point of being nearly half the length of the original cut, and still have it be one of the most unimpeachable masterpieces of the Golden Age of Hollywood, other than Orson Welles? For…

The vast majority of us have at some point or another fantasized about leaving our fast-paced urban lives, and instead disappearing into nature, living off the land as far from civilization as we possibly can, under the belief that the natural world can offer us peace and serenity that is sorely lacking in the more…

“Loneliness is the source of art” Few individuals knew the crushing nature of loneliness quite like Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose life was filled with a rare kind of isolation, one where she was surrounded by a myriad of people, but where she could never find any sense of belonging, to the point where her premature death…

When it was published in 2011, The Sense of an Ending was an immediate sensation, with acclaimed author Julian Barnes having written what many consider to be his masterpiece. Instantly, there was discussion about bringing the novel to the screen, as is often the case with wildly successful works of literature, which is a consolidated…

While I have never claimed to be experienced enough to consider myself desensitized to brutal cinema, once you have seen some of the more controversial works that have been produced over the years (referring specifically to those films that are still made with some artistic integrity and refuse to cross a line), it takes quite…

One of the most common tropes we find in much of contemporary media is the odd couple scenario, in which two individuals who are diametrically opposed find themselves in a situation where they have to find some way to get along, and in the process forge an unlikely friendship that neither of them imagined was…

They say that history is written by the victors and that those who lose usually fade into obscurity. J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the rare historical figures that can be considered both a hero and a villain, a victor and loser in equal measure, and as evidenced by his famous statement “I am become…