The career of Éric Rohmer is one filled with contradictions, and we can see this clearly in any of his films, such as Claire’s Knee (French: Le Genou de Claire), which is often considered one of his crowning achievements. It is a film centred on dialogue, but it is never overly verbose. It is set…

Some films exist to tell a story, others to make the viewer feel a particular sensation. On some rare occasions, we even find a film that’s primary function is to weave together pure visual poetry. This is the most appropriate way to look at The Earrings of Madame De…, the wonderful romantic melodrama by the…

Peter Wilson (Jack Lemmon) is a relatively successful cartoonist who is known to ruffle a few feathers, something that he doesn’t intend to change, especially not with the release of his newest book, entitled The War Between Men and Women, who features his frequent criticisms of the female sex, where women are portrayed as shapeless,…

Looking through Luis Buñuel’s extensive filmography, one might be shocked to discover that he directed an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (under the Spanish title Abismos de pasión), which stands as one of the more unheralded films in the director’s long career. A long-gestating passion project for the esteemed filmmaker, going back to the…

You have to admire the candour with which Albert Brooks made his films over the years – his debut feature film Real Life was all about reality, while his masterpiece Defending Your Life was exactly what it promised based on the premise. Modern Romance is one of the few times we’ve been misled by the…

In the vast landscape of romantic cinema, no one did it better than Luchino Visconti, whose career was populated by achingly beautiful stories of love, usually set to the backdrop of fascinating historical events, making his films multilayered explorations of the human spirit in its various forms. One of his finest achievements, albeit one that…

As one of the formative voices in the New Hollywood movement, Paul Mazursky had quite a distinct style, which he carefully constructed through a series of melancholy comedies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Some of them, such as Next Stop, Greenwich Village and Enemies: A Love Story, are very personal to the director, while others…

There’s something so charming about Italian comedy, even those films that are not necessarily all that original. They’re often made with such wonderful sensitivity, we can’t help but be beguiled by the endearing nature of these stories. It helps a lot that many of the greatest ones were made by directors who were fully-fledged artists…

The Pre-Code era brought us many daring and provocative projects, featuring subject matter that would not stand a chance at making its way into mainstream film after the Hayes Code was established in the mid-1930s, which essentially sought to censor anything even mildly against the conservative principles of Joseph Breen and his very strict opinion…

Any lover of the Golden Era of Hollywood will doubtlessly be aware of the concept known as “the Lubitsch Touch”, in reference to the esteemed director Ernst Lubitsch, who remains one of the most important and accessible directors from this period. There aren’t any easy ways to describe this particular quality – those who worked…