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,…

Debra Granik is a great filmmaker. While not necessarily the most prolific film director, having only directed three feature films (and working on several fiction and non-fiction films in some capacity), she has shown herself to be a remarkably talented artist. This review is concerned with her most recent work of art, the astonishing Leave…

At the beginning of Private Life, the new film from Tamara Jenkins, we are introduced to Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), who are the quintessential artistic couple – he is a theatrical genius known for avant-garde productions, and she is a highly-acclaimed writer whose first book is about to be published after years…

Agnès Varda is an institution. She is a filmmaker who made films before, during and after the French New Wave. She is, by that very rationale, the epitomical figure of the French New Wave – and considering she was one of a few women in a cinematic movement almost entirely controlled by men, her films…