“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…

A young donkey is adopted by a rural French family, intended to be a lovable companion to the children as they pass their days on their farm. Their new pet is named Balthazar, and he is the subject of much adoration from the doting children, who treat him as if he were another member of…

In the mid 18th century, Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina) is a mild-mannered young woman from an affluent French family is forced into the nunnery after her mother reveals that she was not conceived by the wealthy man she has been led to believe is her father, but rather an anonymous man of lower status who…

“There are monsters who act like people, and people who act like monsters” The Japanese New Wave brought attention to many fantastic filmmakers who were afforded the opportunity to tell their subversive stories through venturing beyond the confines of what many of their more formalist (but no less influential) compatriot forerunners had defined as being…

A European auteur (known only here as “Herr Director”) is making his English-language debut, with a film entitled The Undesirables, an overwrought melodrama about deformed patients in a facility, who are all falsely promised the chance to have their lives improved by a sinister doctor, who hides many secrets about his institution from those under…