You can delineate the career of Agnès Varda into various areas (rather than stages, since they often had significant overlap and even occurred concurrently in some spaces) – there are her human dramas that are often driven by a sweetly sentimental sense of individuality, her socially-charged documentary shorts, and her full-length non-fiction pieces that often…

In The Father, his ambitious adaptation of his own stage play, Florian Zeller created one of the most heartbreaking films of the past few years, a strikingly beautiful ode to memory told through the eyes of someone who is on the verge of losing his entire perspective on reality. It was already a peculiar situation…

It’s not often that we witness history being made in the form of a new director almost immediately establishing themselves as a future master of the medium. Shaka King is a young filmmaker who seems to be well on his way to defining cinema in his own unique way, as made abundantly clear by Judas…

The immigrant experience is certainly not a subject that has been neglected by art, with many works of literature over the past two centuries focusing on the process of leaving one’s homeland in search of a better life elsewhere. There’s a reason these stories resonate with such ferocity – they’re sincere and relatable, since every…

Nomadland is the kind of film that really only comes around once or twice in a decade, one that manages to be so profound and understanding in its exploration of the human condition, the very act of just witnessing it seems close to a privilege. Chloé Zhao has been steadily building herself to becoming one…

Situated on a tranquil beach somewhere in the French Riviera is a beautiful mansion, which serves as the summer home to Raymond (David Niven), a well-known Parisian aristocrat and man about town, who has a tendency to romance any woman who catches his attention. Accompanying Raymond on this summer sojourn is his daughter, Cécile (Jean…

It’s a fascinating situation where a film is such an enormous sensation, everything related to it, whether narratively or thematically, is indelibly associated with that particular work. This is most notable when it comes to historical dramas, whereby true events serve as the foundation for some compelling tales. In the case of Moulin Rouge, it’s…

While he was a highly prolific director, one can separate Vincente Minnelli’s work into some major groups, classifying nearly all of his efforts under one of the few categories in which he mostly thrived. Some of his most cherished work falls under the grouping of his melodramas, with many of the films that made him…

Through her capacity as one of the film industry’s preeminent artistic revolutionaries, Agnès Varda introduced many distinct ideas into the global film culture, among them was the concept of cinécriture (“film writing”), perhaps her most important idea, since it is the one factor that not only bound her films together under a single artistic theory,…

One needs to wonder whether, when they were conceiving of the proverbial American Dream in the early 20th century, whether the collective of writers and intellectuals ever considered that the most poignant and effective demonstration of their ideas would come from a film made by a transgender immigrant from the Filipinos. Regardless of whether this…