Like many people, I endlessly admire Paul Thomas Anderson. His rise from a wunderkind young independent filmmaker, having made such masterpiece as Boogie Nights and Magnolia, to one of the most respected cinematic forces working today, with films such as There Will Be Blood and The Master, has been extraordinary, and I personally have not…
Category: Drama
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
Call Me by Your Name left me completely speechless. Sometimes when talking about a film I adored, like the best of people, I can exaggerate slightly and use figures of speech that are not entirely accurate or representative of what I feel or my actual response to an artistic work, and just serve to overhype…
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
It goes without saying that it takes a masterful artist to reflect the dark nuances of humanity in a way that is endearing, hilarious and entertaining, but not dismissive of the subject at hand. Martin McDonagh, through both his extraordinary theatre work as well as his wonderful films, is one such artist, and with his…
3 Women (1977)
In his career that lasted nearly fifty years, Robert Altman directed over three dozen films, and while many of them have gone on to become iconic works of New Hollywood filmmaking, such a prolific career often leads to some films that are less than perfect, and sometimes even far too polarizing to stand alongside some…
Golden Exits (2018)
Independent cinema, as I have noted on multiple occasions, only grows exponentially as a movement every year, with budgets getting lower as concepts get higher. One name has always stood out in the modern independent cinema landscape for a number of reasons, Alex Ross Perry. A filmmaker who appears, on the surface, to be just…
The Florida Project (2017)
Visionary filmmaker and cinematic legend Pedro Almodóvar clearly has flawless taste, and when commenting on The Florida Project, he boldly stated that “Sean Baker is my bet for the future” – and this compliment from one of cinema’s most iconoclastic artists is not undeserved, as Sean Baker has proven himself to be a supremely talented…
Another Year (2010)
Allow me to be completely frank: Mike Leigh is a cinematic genius and has made some of the greatest films of all time. He is the filmmaker responsible for making the film that I consider quite possibly my personal favourite of all time (the astonishing Naked), and I have yet to encounter a film by…
The Post (2017)
One of my more controversial and contentious opinions in regards to cinema is that I never quite bought into the idea that Steven Spielberg was some cinematic doyen, an elder-statesman of quality (and as of late with his one-film-a-year output, quantity) cinema. Many of his more enduring films, such as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost…
Quiz Show (1994)
1994 was an absolutely astonishing year for cinema, and many of my favourite films of all time were released that year – Pulp Fiction, Ed Wood, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Chungking Express all made their mainstream debuts over the course of that one extraordinary year. However, in all honesty, there…
Lucky (2017)
Despite being one of the most straightforward and simple films I’ve seen in a while, it is difficult to speak about Lucky in a way that actually makes sense. There are some films that are almost celestial in how perfect they are, and while I don’t through around the word “perfect” very often, Lucky is…
The Postmodern Pelican 