There is something very magical about seeing a work in progress, especially when it is an interpretation of a play by one of the most celebrated writers of any generation. If we’re not able to witness it firsthand, whatever material remains is often good enough in giving us insights into what made this such a…

It is an unimpeachable fact that Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognizable, iconic figures of 20th-century culture, a face that has adorned every conceivable kind of media across nearly every country around the world. Yet, did we ever truly know who she was? Her legacy is one that is unfortunately defined by the…

You simply can’t look at the work of Yasujirō Ozu and not discuss the impact of the Second World War on the stories he told. He was a filmmaker that may have rarely addressed the war directly, but rather crafted stories that were situated around the time, focusing on the social and cultural changes brought…

Art has always been interested in examining a few fundamental themes – love, death, family and the meaning of life are essentially the main ideas that have persisted for about as long as art has been produced, regardless of the medium. We can group these themes under the general category of the human condition, which…

How does one begin to describe William Douglas Street Jr. in a way that makes sense? Perhaps the first person we should ask is “The Chameleon” himself – but it’s very likely he’d not be able to answer it either, since his entire life has seemingly been committed to taking on numerous personalities, all of…

It was the great photographer Diane Arbus who said “a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know”, which she used to describe her approach to photographing the various people who agreed to be her models as she traversed the streets of her native New York, taking…

We all know someone like Donald “Sully” Sullivan – a person whose fierce rebellion against anything that even vaguely suggests that they are on the older end of the spectrum becomes almost their entire personality, which makes them both frustrating and endearing individuals. This is the stock character that occupies Robert Benton’s exceptional Nobody’s Fool,…

In terms of artistic icons that left behind an indelible legacy in the global culture, there are few more notable than James Dean, whose tragic demise at the age of only 25 signalled one of the most distinct movements towards idolizing an actor, one not seen since perhaps the death of Rudolf Valentino at the…

When you first take a look at A Patch of Blue, you’d be forgiven for thinking it to be yet another run-of-the-mill “message” movie, a film that deals with social issues in a way that may be earnest, but it also often overwrought with how it discusses some very important topics. Guy Green was not…

The Golden Age of Hollywood is filled with stories of the fascinating individuals that made it such a curiously interesting time to be alive, allowing future generations to live through these often scintillating (and sometimes even vaguely implausible) parables that are often told through rose-tinted glasses, almost as if to imply the industry was far…