A priest, a heavy metal musician and a television host walk into a building – this sounds like the set-up for a classic joke, but in reality is the central premise of The Day of the Beast (Spanish: El día de la bestia), the deliriously funny and hopelessly bleak dark comedy by Álex de la…
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
There are many inevitabilities in life, but it seems almost certain that among the more pleasant is the universal love for a good murder mystery. From the novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie, to The White Lotus and the endless criminal procedurals we see in film and television, we share a…
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Why is that of all the genres we can consider, its animation that tends to age the finest? Perhaps we just carry the nostalgia of the films we adored when we were younger into adulthood, refusing to look beneath the veneer of those fond memories in fear of discovering those joyful days were spent with…
Yule Log (2022)
Let’s just start with a wise word of warning – Yule Log is a film that depends entirely on the element of surprise. It isn’t often that I advocate for someone to enter into a film without any prior knowledge, since the experience is so much more compelling if you don’t know what to expect…
California Split (1974)
Robert Altman was certainly awfully busy in the 1970s – he had started as a director-for-hire in the late 1950s, but it was only when he made MASH that he started to take on something of an authorial voice as both a writer and a director. Over the course of the following decade, he’d make…
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)
It seems that one of the great cinematic inevitabilities is that every major director, should they work for long enough, will end up making a film that is immensely personal to them. The two broadest categories are those that focus on their upbringing (which have become more common in recent years), and self-reflective examinations of…
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
There comes a moment when every viewer looks at a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and finds themselves somewhat at a loss for words. The duo, affectionately known collectively as The Archers when working together, produced work of such an immensely high calibre, it seems almost inexplicable that someone can consider them to…
Novocaine (2001)
The act of describing Novocaine is certainly a challenge. Not too many films like this tend to come about all that often anymore, and when they do, they’re mostly defined by a very precise control of tone and register that establishes them as potential cult classics, something that has yet to be bestowed on this…
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
Would it be cliche to begin this conversation by saying that the story at the heart of Beauty and the Beast (French: La Belle et la Bête) is based on a tale as old as time? Regardless, this is the perfect entry point to starting our discussion on Jean Cocteau’s masterful adaptation of the timeless…
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Very few novels have had as bizarre a journey to the screen as Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the semi-autobiographical account of the trip he and his eccentric lawyer took to Las Vegas in the early 1970s, focusing on fictionalized adventures of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, the surrogates for the…
The Postmodern Pelican 