“His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them” Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith occupies quite a peculiar place in the history of English literature – her works are embraced as wildly entertaining and genuinely daring pieces of writing, with stories that strike a…

“It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds—look for the cleanest fingernails.” There are many fragments of sentences in Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh that are immediately striking, and the entire novel is a tightly wound, masterful examination of many different concepts and one of the most ambitious literary debuts of the past decade. Yet, this one…

There is a very narrow boundary between love and obsession, and some may even argue that the lines become increasingly blurred once someone grows too fond of the object of their affection, to the point where it can become quite disturbing. Literature has developed quite an appreciation for this ambiguity since we find stories of…

As enormously respected as he may have been, Alfred Hitchcock seemed to be driven by the concept of quantity over quality, especially earlier in his career. It was not unheard of for the esteemed filmmaker to produce more than one film in a given year, which mercifully became less common as he grew in stature…

Many themes have become widespread subjects of examination in the arts, some of them less positive than others. The concept of obsession has a unique place within the culture since it is certainly universal in the sense that we all understand what it means and how it feels, but very few of us hopefully have…

While it may be an unpopular opinion, the past decade has not been the peak of David Fincher’s career in terms of his cinematic output – he successfully helmed Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but couldn’t prevent it from descending into pulpy cliche on more than one occasion which has prevented it from being seen as…

While he is most well-regarded for his irreverent, often verbose philosophical comedies that offer sharp criticisms of the human condition, Woody Allen has never been afraid to take a few risks when they are most appropriate. There came a point in his career where he started to experiment with genre, particularly making films in which…

By the time had started production on Saboteur, Alfred Hitchcock had already become something of an established filmmaker. He wasn’t the extraordinarily popular director known as The Master of Suspense who could make essentially any film he wanted due to his reputation as one of the great maestros of his craft, but he did have…

While it may seem peculiar to even imagine such a project existed, there is a film that exists at the perfect intersection between Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a concept that is almost too absurd to be realistic. However, it is very much extant, as evident by Rendez-vous, the ambitious feature-length…

Nestled securely in the heart of the tumultuos 1990s is a film written by Hilary Henkin, the journeyman screenwriter responsible for working on some of Hollywood’s most ambitious productions, and directed by Peter Medak, the creative mind behind films like The Ruling Class and The Changeling, films that were not thoroughly appreciated at the time…