Biopics – either you love them or you hate them. I seem to be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. There is nothing I adore more than a riveting, exciting biographical film about an interesting figure, but there is also very few things I absolutely despise more than a saccharine, meandering biopic about…
Category: Drama
Carol (2015)
I recently watched Brooklyn, and I was somewhat disappointed in it. I was hesitant about Carol, a film that shares a lot of themes with Brooklyn, such as the 1950s setting, the story of a girl out of water, finding unexpected love and a job that allows her to grow as a person. The two…
Secrets & Lies (1996)
There are very few words that can describe how much I adore Mike Leigh. Not only do I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers working today, I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, one that matches the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. The only other filmmaker that is…
The Dance of Reality (2013)
I adore surrealism. I think it is the most unique and brilliant sub-genre of art that has ever existed. How can complete absurdity, and otherworldly imagery, come together to form something so human and realistic? At the forefront of the surrealist film movement is Alejandro Jodorowsky, a man I have admired for many years, both…
Brooklyn (2015)
Period dramas can either be dreadfully boring or wonderfully entertaining, depending on the approach taken. There are some period dramas that tell a true story, and others that tell fictional stories set in the past. Brooklyn falls into the latter group, and while it certainly was not dreadfully boring by any stretch of the imagination,…
Room (2015)
It is a strange occurrence when a film brings you to tears. I won’t pretend to be a tough person by claiming to have the ability to not be brought to tears. There are a few films that made me a complete emotional wreck, and while I may not be overly sensitive to the tricks…
In the Mood for Love (2000)
It was about two years ago when my perception of cinema was completely changed, when I saw a film that broke the boundaries of what a film could make one feel. The film was Chungking Express, a bizarre and brilliant masterpiece of cinema. The mind behind that film was Wong Kar-Wai, a filmmaker who has…
The Great Beauty (2013)
What can I say about this behemoth of a film? Finding words for something like The Great Beauty is an extraordinarily difficult task. I could list an entire dictionary of terms to explain what I felt about The Great Beauty – complex, hilarious, meaningful, brilliant, twisted. It is a film unlike any you will ever…
The End of the Tour (2015)
My love of books predates my love of cinema, and something I have noticed is the almost complete lack of films about writers. We have so many biopics of musicians, athletes and performers, but very rarely films about authors, which is a shame because, in some ways, they are some of the most interesting people…
Beasts of No Nation (2015)
War films have the ability to be either an absolute chore to get through, or to be moving and emotional adventures into times of extreme suffering. War films, in my humble opinion, are best when they are unflinching in regards to their subject matter. What is the use of telling the audience a story about…
The Postmodern Pelican 