Undine is the kind of film that becomes more meaningful after having seen it. Christian Petzold is an undeniably gifted filmmaker, but his brand of hyper-intelligent cultural critiques often work better once the viewer has had some time to digest the work and come to terms with its innumerable themes on our own time. The…

Any cursory analysis of classic Japanese cinema will return a number of great filmmakers, but most notably consist of four names of artists who almost single-handedly defined the filmmaking landscape for most of the twentieth century, despite them coming from slightly different generations for the most part. They are Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Yasujirō Ozu…

Somewhere in the coastal town of Biarritz sits a hotel – in it resides Gilles (Patrick Dewaere), the son of the owner of the establishment, and a young man who has just returned from a trip to New York City. One evening, he is almost run over by a passing motorist, who turns out to…

One of the main areas in studying queer history is to obviously look into the past, and see how certain events shaped national and global perceptions of issues relating to the LGBTQIA+ community. One of the most significant moments came in 1901, in what is referred to as the Dance of the Forty-One, where a…

Once you’ve been a working actor for nearly forty years, you tend to learn a few things about how Hollywood works, especially if you’ve been an insider into the industry. Very few exemplify the concept of hard work quite as much as Robin Wright, an actress who has seen every side of the industry, and…

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…