We recently lost the extremely talented Robert Downey, Sr., which evoked a wealth of conversations surrounding his importance to the world of cinema, as made very clear by the legions of people who remarked on his brilliance as one of the formative voices in American independent cinema, which would not have been the cherished institution…

Like most of the world, my first encounter with Bo Burnham was through his comedy specials, where he was essentially just a charming young comedian in his early twenties, playing the keyboard and reciting a variety of peculiar songs, interspersed with hilarious anecdotes that fit his particular brand of humour. These very very funny, and…

“What is Hollywood by Babylon and sunshine?” At some point in the 1960s, revolutionary filmmaker Agnès Varda spent some time in Los Angeles (and a few other parts of America, mostly settling on the West Coast), directing a variety of narrative and documentary films, some of which stand as her best work, and her most…

There are some artists who inspire excitement and endless anticipation when they announce a new project, regardless of what it may be. Pedro Almodóvar has been the gold standard for European filmmaking (and essentially the entire arthouse as a whole) for most of his career, which reached a crescendo in the 1990s, when he was…

In an incredibly prolific career, Robert Altman proved himself to be quite a formidable filmmaker, being one of the few artists who successfully mastered both the art of producing quality and quantity, which is quite an elusive concept that not many people are able to stake a legitimate claim towards. It meant that, despite making…

Querelle is a bloated, pretentious and incredibly convoluted mess of a film – and it’s one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest achievements. Not normally a film discussed outside of the context of being the director’s final work, it is something that appeals more to those interested in looking at Fassbinder’s oeuvre in more detail, than…

Absurdity can take many different forms, particularly when it comes to artistic expression, with many individuals over the past century making their living from subverting the central tenets of reality. One such artist was Karen Shakhnazarov, whose ambition film Zerograd (Russian: Gorod Zero) holds the distinction of being one of the most bizarre works of…

There are a few artists whose entire reputation is essentially built from their penchant for the strange and absurd – David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Cronenberg usually sit atop this pedestal, with their very different styles making them profoundly unique filmmakers, differing in style, but united in their general ambivalence to traditional logic. However,…

Here are a few things I know to be true: firstly, the Japanese New Wave is one of the most sorely underrepresented of all film movements, with many of its works being tragically ignored in favour of others, which is truly shameful since some of the most inventive films ever made were produced by this…