It’s been nearly five years since the most recent entry into this series, which aims to take a filmmaker who I personally admire or feel a strong affinity to, exploring their career and discussing the films that they made over the course of their lives, ranking and critically analysing each one of them. The past…
Save Sandra (2021)
One of the facts that we all have to accept at some point is that life just sometimes isn’t fair – and few stories portray this more vividly than that of Sandra Massart, the 7-year-old Belgian girl who was diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called metachromatic leukodystrophy (also known as MLD), a brain condition…
Office Killer (1997)
For about as long as our species has been labouring, the workplace has bred a range of unlikable colleagues, whether it be incompetent co-workers or despotic managers. Art has never been afraid to point this out, normally in the form of more upbeat content that shows the day-to-day struggles of the ordinary working-class individual and…
The Cheyenne Social Club (1970)
Gene Kelly didn’t direct too many films, but he did make a fair share of great ones. The majority of the ones that he is most remembered for are musicals (often co-directed by close friend and collaborator Stanley Donen, who worked with Kelly to make some of the greatest entries into the genre in history),…
Nightmare Alley (2021)
Despite being one of the more cherished directors working today, Guillermo del Toro’s films may be considered an acquired taste. With the exception of a couple of films that are almost universally praised and adored, his work is quite divisive, which is less of an implication of him being a director that doesn’t register with…
Tempest (1982)
Throughout a career that saw him essentially redefining how comedy is made, particularly in his approach to looking at some very serious subjects through his off-kilter brand of melancholic humour, Paul Mazursky made some terrific films. One of the great stalwarts of a particular era in American filmmaking, he was not someone afraid to push…
The Machine That Kills Bad People (1952)
The name Roberto Rossellini evokes many different images, very few of them having anything to do with comedy. He was not a director known for making lighthearted films, instead being one of the formative voices in the Italian neo-realist movement, which saw him addressing the postwar period through an array of gritty, direct dramas that…
Licorice Pizza (2021)
As is the case with many filmgoers, it doesn’t take much for me to get invested in the prospect of a new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has proven himself to be one of the most versatile filmmakers working in cinema today. The past quarter-century has been dominated by discourse around his steadily-growing status…
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
When I first saw Napoleon Dynamite (which was most likely around the time of its original release) I found it funny but unremarkable, the kind of well-meaning independent comedies that had good intentions, but became unbearable once audiences adopted the mannerisms of the characters, making them part of their personality, which was funny for a…
1. April 2000 (1952)
There is a certain deranged pleasure that comes in watching films made many decades ago that supposedly predict a future we have already bypassed – while those set in the distant future tend to be quite compelling, the most fascinating are those that look slightly closer to reality, as is the case in 1. April…
The Postmodern Pelican 