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…

The cinematic event of the year is undeniably A Star Is Born – it is a film that has taken the world by surprise, and surpassed every expectation put upon the third remake of a classic film. A great deal has been written about this film – many have mentioned how A Star Is Born…

Loulou is a great film, a formal romantic masterpiece that sees director Maurice Pialat abandoning the stylistic pretensions of the French New Wave for something brutal, raw and visceral, a beautifully-constructed drama set in the dingy apartments and overcrowded bars of Paris and surrounds, as we watch the inner psychological workings of three core characters,…