There’s a sub-genre of comedy that was wildly popular throughout the 1980s, but has seemingly either been mangled to the point of being beyond recognition, or disappeared entirely. These films were based on a simple premise – either an individual or group of people set off for a day out in some major city or…
My Donkey, My Lover & I (2020)
Not since Robert Bresson defined realist cinema with his masterful Au Hasard Balthasar has a film about the friendship between a human and a donkey been as moving as My Donkey, My Lover & I (French: Antoinette dans les Cévennes), a film that celebrates love just as much as it does evoke a lot of…
Starman (1984)
The early 1980s saw a massive shift in the science fiction genre – they were no longer restricted to the realm of the B-movie, and could exist as a legitimate art form unto themselves, instead of being seen as niche genre work. This is very likely the result of the laborious effort put in by…
Elvis (2022)
“This ain’t no nostalgia show…we’re going to try something different” When it comes to music biographies, we seem to have run the gamut – we’ve had traditional recountings of the lives of famous artists, and more subversive attempts to portray the rise and fall of some of our greatest musicians. It seemed almost inevitable that…
The Watermelon Woman (1996)
When Cheryl Dunye set out to make her first feature-length film after a few years of short-format filmmaking, she had quite a challenge ahead of her, not only because she was a relatively novice director, but also because there were simply very few people like her making films, even in the independent sphere. However, these…
Late Spring (1949)
As arguably Japan’s foremost cultural critic, few filmmakers managed to as effectively explore the life and times of ordinary citizens quite as well as Yasujirō Ozu, whose work reflects a keen sense of interest in the human condition, which has fuelled so many of his incredible films. As is often the case with notoriously prolific…
Mother (1996)
As unheralded as a filmmaker as he may be, Albert Brooks certainly has quite a knack for telling stories that resonate with many viewers, in a way that is accessible and endearing, rather than being contrite in the way many mainstream comedies tend to be. A populist filmmaker, but one that uses his platform in…
The Girl and the Spider (2022)
Time is a concept that we all take for granted. We tend to perceive life as a linear series of events, days that turn into weeks, which subsequently turn into the variable months and years that we exist in the period that we all know quite simply as life. This is a peculiar way to…
Under Capricorn (1949)
When looking at the long career of Alfred Hitchcock, we can divide it into various distinct eras – there were the experimental 1970s, the provocative 1960s, the absolutely rivetting 1950s (his greatest decade) and the tumultuous 1940s. This decade in particular was notable for being the one that had some of the director’s most significant…
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
There are many ways to identify a great filmmaker, but one of the most reliable methods is whether they turn the most simple premise into a profoundly moving experience. In an industry driven by spectacle and artistic innovation, sometimes the most effective works entail a director simply having a good story, a room in which…
The Postmodern Pelican 