As one of the greatest filmmakers to ever work in the medium (not a revolutionary opinion, but rather very close to an objective fact), Alfred Hitchcock’s career is filled with a wide array of films of varying quality. What is most interesting is that even lower-tier Hitchcock films are still absolutely worth watching, with very…

Breaking from tradition was not always Alfred Hitchcock’s speciality, particularly in the subversive little quirks that defined his films. Regardless of how strange and bewildering his stories were, all of his films were distinctly his own. This required director himself to appear before the start of The Wrong Man, speaking directly to the audience as…

A faux-Gucci bag filled with money, half a dozen eccentric characters, an abundance of violence and the good sense to weave it all together are the essential components of Beasts Clawing at Straws (Korean: 지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들), the deliriously funny and perverted dark comedy by South Korean filmmaker  Kim Yong-hoon, who crafted one of…

Many film scholars have provoked the idea of a Polish New Wave, a movement that represented a seismic shift in the cinema of a country that was hit quite hard by the burden of communism, on the same level of a number of other USSR-aligned countries. Yet, it has been questioned whether the films produced…

A mantra that I hold very dear is that if a film can’t be good, the next best thing is for it to be camp. This certainly is a good starting point for The Woman in the Window, which is the kind of pulpy, trashy thriller that peaked in the early 1990s, and rarely managed…

Unfortunately, Paradise Now (Arabic: الجنّة الآن‎) hasn’t aged particularly well, despite being something of a sensation at the time of its release. Perhaps it’s the fact that it courted more controversy than was to be anticipated, or that the film isn’t always free of some glaring flaws the distract from an otherwise compelling story. Yet,…

The Pre-Code era was a time when Hollywood genuinely believed that you could make a film about a police officer going undercover to investigate an illegal drug ring by putting a moustache and hat on him and convincing everyone around him that he is a different person. Yet, this kind of flawed logic is more…

In recent years, Korean cinema has exploded into the mainstream, with audiences all around the world starting to pay attention to the work being produced in the tiny nation, particularly since many of these filmmakers tell stories that we can’t necessarily find elsewhere. The global obsession with the country’s cinematic output extends for around the…

Most of the time, I tend to avoid discussing situations where a film has achieved the status of being considered one of the greatest of all times, because it would normally come down to reiterating many of the same points that others have made about why this particular work deserves the title, or it will…

Johnny Triton (Edward G. Robinson) has earned a living as a marginally famous mentalist, performing to mildly-amused nightclub crowds, who marvel at his supposed skillfulness at telling their future, which he does through logic and educated guessing. However, he has recently come to discover that he is indeed able to get visions of the future,…