There are some artists whose work is singularly impossible to describe since even attempting to condense the impact they made on their medium into a single coherent sentence is a challenge, primarily because understanding their brilliance requires us to address several different elements that went into the creation of their work. There is a reason…
Category: Romance
Mauvais Sang (1986)
An enigmatic young man runs down the street – we can’t tell if he’s overcome with joy or panic, and the use of David Bowie’s “Modern Love” doesn’t make his state of mind any more clear, and only creates more dissonance between the tone and what is being asserted in this particular moment. Yet, despite…
Queer (2024)
William S. Burroughs is a writer whose work has divided the reading audience for decades – some view his style as being experimental, daring and unconventional to the point of being borderline revolutionary, while others perceive his novels and short stories as bloated, self-indulgent works designed to confuse and frustrate with their impenetrable style and…
We Live in Time (2024)
We tend to view life as a single stream of events, occurring in linear time and aiming to reach a particular destination – and the fact that we are obsessed with chronology to the point where we tend to focus on every unit of time. The great irony of this universal tendency is that in…
Hot Saturday (1932)
Discussions about the Pre-Code era are certainly not elusive around these parts. This period of Hollywood history is one of the most fascinating, since that brief period between the silent era and the implementation of the Hays Code was home to some of the most boundary-pushing, daring works, the likes of which we wouldn’t see…
Eternally Yours (1939)
Every marriage has its ups and downs, with some having more than others. This is the case for Anita Halstead and Tony (otherwise known as The Great Arturo) – he is a charming and world-renowned magician, and she is his doting wife, their relationship started when she was in attendance at one of his performances,…
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Few filmmakers can lay claim to having a career even marginally as successful as Ernst Lubitsch, whose work as a writer and director quite literally changed the way the film industry viewed comedy. Choosing his masterpiece is a challenging endeavour since there are a number of terrific films that he helmed during his peak, which…
Lovers and Other Strangers (1970)
Love is a funny concept – it’s something nearly everyone feels at some point in their life, whether intimately or from a distance, but it’s also not something we entirely understand. Science claims that it is the result of some kind of chemical reaction, philosophers view it as having very deep existential roots, and religious…
This Is the Night (1932)
Infidelity has rarely been funnier than in This Is the Night, the Pre-Code comedy directed by Frank Tuttle, which tells the story of a pair of lovers whose romantic journey to Venice is disrupted by the major inconvenience that comes in the form of a spouse returning from an overseas trip long before he was…
Cream (2021)
The theme of a lonely individual finding themselves through their love of food, which serves as a replacement for their crippling loneliness, has been massively appropriated by modern cinema, with the motif of the fiercely independent young person using more traditional cravings to stand in for their inability to maintain a relationship constantly serving as…
The Postmodern Pelican 