Whether or not you find his particular brand of filmmaking effective, there are few names that evoke the idea of quality quite as much as Vincente Minnelli, whose career is filled to the brim with every kind of film, ranging from big-budget musicals to lush melodramas, intimate character-studies and barn-burning extravaganzas that have solidified their…
The Bright Side (2021)
“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” – these words appear whenever someone is talking about the frequent excursions many artists make when it comes to the subject of death. The great inevitability is a subject that has provoked and inspired directors for generations, especially when it comes to looking at it through the lens of…
Drive My Car (2021)
From a contemporary cinematic perspective, there are few artists quite as interesting as Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who has steadily found his status growing in esteem, moving from the director of films like Happy Hour (more known for its intimidating running time than it is for the contents of those five hours of stunning filmmaking) and Asako…
People Will Talk (1951)
At the perfect intersection between screwball comedy and romantic melodrama resides People Will Talk, a daring and provocative film by the legendary Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was operating at his creative peak around this time, having just redefined the Golden Age of Hollywood with the iconic All About Eve, as well as a range of…
The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
Once you spend a considerable amount of time with Leos Carax and his films, you start to realize that he is not a director all that interested in playing by the rules, preferring to entirely dismantle the art of filmmaking on both the narrative and visual level, while still retaining a sense of control and…
Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989)
The sheer amount of stories that we’ve seen written about capitalism, either its joys or failures, is almost too staggering to count, especially since they extend to the very outset of the idea of free-market economy, which some viewed as being indicative of a new level of outright freedom, others seeing it as a way…
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we just wish to freeze time, and run through the streets, liberated from the need to partake in a world that grows increasingly more hostile the more we uncover its secrets, which is one of the inevitabilities of venturing into adulthood. This concept is the centrepiece scene…
Carmen Comes Home (1951)
There are many ways to describe Carmen Comes Home (Japanese: カルメン故郷に帰る), but the most appropriate would be to call it a film built on contradictions. It is bawdy yet elegant, hilarious yet melancholy, dignified yet playful, and simple but always consistently striking. Keisuke Kinoshita was a director who had a strong grasp on his craft,…
The Slender Thread (1965)
Art loves a crisis. There’s something about a person (or several) being in peril that inherently fascinates us and keeps us coming back, especially when it is in relation to the movies – from horror to action, comedy to melodrama, people facing adversity is the foundation of the film industry in one way or the…
Medea (1969)
We can divide the career of Pier Paolo Pasolini into various eras, based on both the specific stories he was focusing on, and the motivations behind telling them. His adaptations were the most interesting, and regardless of whether the director was making something faithful to the source material, or transposing these themes onto a more…
The Postmodern Pelican 