Independent cinema has had a long and storied history, but it cannot be viewed as a single endless stream, but rather a series of chapters, each one defined as something of a generation in a long journey towards negotiating the boundary between the mainstream and the arthouse. One of the most fascinating, at least in…
Category: Drama
Orphan (2025)
There was a point when we thought László Nemes was going to be the next great European auteur. He showed a lot of promise with Son of Saul, a film that has some flaws but is still an ambitious achievement. That proved to be somewhat of a divisive work, and one that did contain several…
Red (2008)
When someone has experienced an unspeakable tragedy, there is very little that can be done to soothe a broken soul – but for some, accountability is more than enough to push them towards a place of healing. This isn’t always necessarily easy to acquire, especially not when it involves people who don’t understand the enormity…
Last Orders (2001)
“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” These words form perhaps the simplest but effective summary of what friendship represents – and surprisingly, it is not a contemporary quote, but rather found in the musings of the great philosopher Aristotle, who spoke about the concept of friendship with such beautiful and…
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
There are some topics that are naturally more suitable to the cinematic form, based on their universality and the fact that we can usually relate to them thoroughly in one way or another. However, there are also those that are the inverse – regardless of how hard one may try, it’s very difficult to explore…
Matt and Mara (2024)
Change is good – there isn’t anyone who has ever benefited from remaining the same, and whether it’s small shifts in attitudes or an entire overhaul of your identity and its external expression, the tendency to grow is undeniably important and frankly exciting in most instances. However, there’s something peculiar that happens when we encounter…
After the Hunt (2025)
We live in a time where watching your words has never been more essential. Even the simplest of statements, or a joke delivered to the wrong audience, could land someone in a position where their entire reputation is at stake, and sometimes even entirely tarnished. My personal thoughts on the issue are complex and layered,…
Silent Friend (2025)
“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky” These words were written by Khalil Gibran, whose perspective often existed at the perfect intersection between poetry and philosophy – and while it seems to be a trivial concept at the start, there is some degree of truthfulness in how it begins to describe the…
Devil and the Deep (1932)
There are some themes that we can consider universal when it comes to understanding the root of what drives us to create art – and while there are the more obvious choices, such as love, family and death (the trio of topics to which nearly every work of art can be traced), others are slightly…
Wind, Talk to Me (2025)
Nothing bonds a family like trauma, since the experience of losing a loved one tends to bring even the most conflicted people together as they attempt to navigate the grief and despair that comes with a great loss. In the case of Wind, Talk to Me, director Stefan Djordjevic makes his feature-length debut, crafting a…
The Postmodern Pelican 