From a contemporary perspective, Woody Allen is a bit of an anomaly, since he is someone who has developed into something of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to working in many different genres, but he’s still retained his distinctive authorial voice behind the camera, one being able to recognize one of his films without much…

Deb (Glenn Close) seems to have her life together – she has a mildly successful job working as a beautician at a local casino, and her husband (Stephen Root) is always very supportive of her pursuits. They’re an ordinary suburban couple without much excitement in their lives – but Deb does carry a secret burden,…

It doesn’t take an expert to realize that the films of Yasujirō Ozu tend to follow familiar patterns – the majority of them focus on working-class Japanese citizens in various cities around the country, coming to terms with their own personal quandaries in the years preceding or following the Second World War, which wrought irrevocable…

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young woman living in rural Missouri. Her mother suffers from chronic illness, and her father has seemingly abandoned his family, with the suspicion being that he has returned to his life of crime. However, this turns out to be more than a problem when the family is visited by…

There are very few reasons to not find Rabbit Hole to be an incredibly compelling and worthwhile film. Coming in at a neat 91-minutes, John Cameron Mitchell has turned the acclaimed stage play by David Lindsay-Abaire into a powerful drama about grief that hits hard and leaves us reeling in emotions in how it explores…

What is most interesting about the films of Éric Rohmer is that they are simultaneously beautifully simple, but somehow manage to still compress multitudes of ideas and themes into the most straightforward representation of life the viewer is bound to see, derived from his work alongside many other French filmmakers that set out to reflect…

A brief personal story to preface this review – when watching The Remains of the Day recently, I was struck by memories of a very particular time in my life, probably somewhere in primary school. Whenever the question would come up in class about what we wanted to be when we grow up, my classmates’…

Daddy Nostalgia is the kind of film that has value we don’t realize until we’re nearly done. Bertrand Tavernier was a profoundly gifted filmmaker, a multi-generational French storyteller that could weave together the most complex plots into some of the most profoundly moving testaments to the human condition. However, this film in particular is one…

When looking at any form of postcolonial literature written by an author that is part of a previously marginalized group, we can see some degree of “writing back”, whereby they are constructing works that not only describe their experiences or those of their ancestors, but also serve a discursive function, commenting on the issues that…

“The day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory that appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events.” These profound words occur towards the middle of Wild Strawberries (Swedish: Smultronstället), one of the many unimpeachable masterpieces handcrafted by the incredible Ingmar Bergman, produced at a time in…