There are many distinctive signs of a great director – whether it be a strong visual style, the ability to extract strong performances from their actors, or just the general skillfulness needed to entertain an audience. My personal belief is that any talented director should be able to take a strong script that contains only…
Pig (2021)
If there is something literature has taught us, it’s not to cross a man and his beloved pet – and in the instance of Pig, doing so can have long-lasting consequences on anyone daring enough to get in the way of a beloved companion. The directorial debut of Michael Sarnoski is one of the year’s…
The War Between Men and Women (1972)
Peter Wilson (Jack Lemmon) is a relatively successful cartoonist who is known to ruffle a few feathers, something that he doesn’t intend to change, especially not with the release of his newest book, entitled The War Between Men and Women, who features his frequent criticisms of the female sex, where women are portrayed as shapeless,…
Ilo Ilo (2013)
Motherhood is difficult, especially when you’re taking care of other people’s children. This strange assertion is the most simple way to describe Ilo Ilo (Chinese: 爸媽不在家), the ambitious directorial debut of Anthony Chen, who handcrafts a delicate and meaningful ode to the human condition, specifically the many countless women who have taken it upon themselves…
Bergman Island (2021)
Reality is often much stranger than fiction, which is an adage that no one seems to know better than Mia Hansen-Løve, who has steadily ascended to the status of being one of the most fascinating and essential voices in contemporary European cinema. Her English-language debut is Bergman Island, which (as the title suggests) takes place…
Wuthering Heights (1954)
Looking through Luis Buñuel’s extensive filmography, one might be shocked to discover that he directed an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (under the Spanish title Abismos de pasión), which stands as one of the more unheralded films in the director’s long career. A long-gestating passion project for the esteemed filmmaker, going back to the…
tick, tick…BOOM! (2021)
For most, the name Jonathan Larson may not be entirely familiar, since he is mostly associated with the stage, having been the creative mind behind Rent, the cultural sensation that swept the world asunder and presented audiences with one of the most raw and visceral documents of the experience of simply being alive in a…
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
There were many great filmmakers that defined the screwball film, which dominated the comedy genre in the 1930s and 1940s, but two in particular redefined what these films meant. The first is Ernst Lubitsch, arguably the finest comedic director to ever work in the medium, and the other is Preston Sturges, whose work reflects a…
The Mule (2018)
There are two ways to look at The Mule – the first is as one of the many forgettable dramas Clint Eastwood churns out every year, taking advantage of his ability to pull together a film in only a matter of months. The second is as one of the most unintentionally fascinating comedies of the…
Hobson’s Choice (1954)
Seeing the great British comedy Hobson’s Choice labelled as “a David Lean film” is peculiar, since we’ve become so culturally conditioned to thinking of the esteemed filmmaker as one who made enormous historical epics, where their visual scope was only matched by their length and ability to venture deep into particular periods in history. Taken…
The Postmodern Pelican 