The intersecting lives of a group of ordinary people are presented to us through In Safe Hands (French: Pupille), a beautifully-poetic story that seeks to explore humanity in its various forms. A baby is born, and his young mother (Leïla Muse) is adamant that she doesn’t want to keep him, for a number of reasons….

Doc Delaney (Burt Lancaster) and his wife Lola (Shirley Booth) are a middle-aged couple that have been married for over twenty years. They’re a seemingly idyllic couple – they live in a quaint suburban home and lead a remarkably simple life. Doc is a chiropractor who is beloved by the community, and Lola is a…

Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) and his wife Rosie (Odessa Young) are on their way to Bennington, Vermont, where Fred will be starting a residency at the local university, under the guidance of Professor Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a revered academic known for his depth of knowledge of literature, and his notoriously challenging approach to…

The Second World War continues to make its way across Europe, gradually taking over the lives of everyone, encroaching as far as the smallest villages of Czechoslovakia, which is where we situate ourselves here. Tóno Brtko (Jozef  Kroner) is a humble craftsman who is perfectly content to live a very simple life as a carpenter,…

“Love is a stream, it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop” John Cassavetes is unquestionably one of the most important filmmakers to ever work in the medium – and through the course of working through his career, I’ve grown particularly fond of him for a variety of reasons, all of which can easily be found converging in…

Kathy (Hong Chau) is a young woman from Michigan who has recently lost her older sister to a heart attack and has to make the journey to a small town in suburban New York to pack up her house, with her son, Cody (Lucas Jaye) accompanying on the trip. She had grown apart from his…

Woody Allen’s career has always fascinated me – over the course of over fifty years, he’s made dozens of films, demonstrating a longevity and versatility very few filmmakers have been able to match, at least in terms of quantity. His career can also be segmented into different periods, with the 1980s seeing Allen slightly step…

When considering filmmakers that have risen to the level of folkloric reputations, there are few that embody the towering brilliance better than Akira Kurosawa. His iconic career, which stretched over half a century and saw the director venture into so many different genres, sampling from innumerable styles and telling a wide array of stories, it…

There are some filmmakers that extend beyond simply being auteurs – their significance wasn’t merely limited to their mastery of the craft of cinema, but extended into being historically resonant in terms of definitive artistry. Satyajit Ray was undeniably one of them, and standing as one of the greatest filmmakers of his (or any) generation,…

The Joy Luck Club is composed of four elderly Chinese women who immigrated to the United States of America decades prior to knowing each other, having met at church and formed a strong bond over the years. They spend their afternoons playing mahjong and telling stories, normally about their past experiences. One of them, Suyuan…