Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan), along with their son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) are the quintessential 1960s suburban family – he works a menial but solid job, she is a dedicated housewife and mother, and their son is a hard-working student with wide ambitions. They are a nomadic family, constantly moving, a result…

Beautiful Boy is not a good film. It is not a comfortable film, nor is it particularly pleasant. It is often extremely heavy-handed and in many instances, it may be dour enough to qualify as being the most miserable film of the year. However, Beautiful Boy is still an extraordinary film simply on its premise,…

After seeing Roma, I sat in stunned silence. My heart was pounding, and the tears were welling up as if they hadn’t been flowing freely throughout the previous two hours. I wasn’t sure of what I had just experienced, but I knew that it was something that made my heart swell in ways films rarely…

“It is not about the destination, it is about the journey” – we’ve all heard this old adage, or something similar, at some point. It may be taut and often used to justify self-important metaphysical meanderings, but it does hold some portion of truthfulness. It is also very relevant to the subject of this review,…

After watching We the Animals, I sat in awed silence, unable to move for a considerable amount of time. My chest was heavy, and I was at a complete loss for words – the preceding ninety minutes had contained to be some of the most exhilarating filmmaking I have seen this year. There aren’t too…

In 1937, Leo McCarey made The Awful Truth, a delightful film I absolutely devoured and which instantly became one of my favourite screwball comedies. It was a warm, joyful and hilarious film that I truly adored for its marvellous sense of humour and its warmhearted storyline. That same year, McCarey made another film, Make Way…

Sometimes, on the rare occasion, you see a film that pushes the boundaries of what one would think as being remotely possible in narrative storytelling. Recently, I witnessed a film that I had been eagerly anticipating since its explosive debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. That film was Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline,…

With what is undeniably one of his masterworks, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, Albert Lewin did something quite astonishing – he took a very formal premise garnered from a classic French text and morphed it into a remarkable achievement, a positively riveting affair that is scandalous without being cheap, and exhilarating without losing its…

Dispersed Clouds is the kind of film that makes me truly appreciate cinema – a small and intimate social drama that has an explosively powerful message at its core and an execution that understands the human condition with incredible profundity, a film that always does more than it says and ends up being a magnificent…