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…

There are some that consider A Hen in the Wind (Japanese: 風の中の牝鶏) to be one of the more minor efforts in the notoriously prolific career of Yasujirō Ozu – and while it is easy to adhere to this belief based on the scope of the film (considering how this was the final film he made…

Nothing signals tenacity more than a filmmaker doing whatever possible to get their film made. This is applicable to Fei Mu, whose film Spring in a Small Town (Chinese: 小城之春) was a labour of love in every definition of the term. Not being given much resources on which to construct this film, and seemingly being…

As one of the most notoriously prolific directors of his generation, Hong Sang-soo is someone that is consistently managing to defy expectations and find new stories to tell. A surface-level glance at the films he has made over the years might lead the untrained eye to assume that he peddles in the near-derogatory sub-genre of…

Despite reigning supreme as one of the most sought-after directors during the Golden Age of Hollywood as a result of his enormous versatility of a filmmaker, Frank Borzage has been continuously under-appreciated in recent years, with his films not receiving as much attention as those of his contemporaries that have held a more significant cultural…

There comes a point in everyone’s life whereby we feel as if we are simply floating through it – the world doesn’t make much sense, and we are simply just beings existing for a brief moment before perishing. While this is a nihilistic view, it is one that has been at the forefront of a…