It’s not often that we witness history being made in the form of a new director almost immediately establishing themselves as a future master of the medium. Shaka King is a young filmmaker who seems to be well on his way to defining cinema in his own unique way, as made abundantly clear by Judas…
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987)
Everybody loves Éric Rohmer – or at least everyone who has an appreciation for the simple things in life and how it is reflected in art. Throughout his prolific career (which stretched from the earliest days of the French New Wave, to the middle of the contemporary era). One of the most important French directors…
Minari (2020)
The immigrant experience is certainly not a subject that has been neglected by art, with many works of literature over the past two centuries focusing on the process of leaving one’s homeland in search of a better life elsewhere. There’s a reason these stories resonate with such ferocity – they’re sincere and relatable, since every…
The Paper Chase (1973)
James Hart (Timothy Bottoms) has steady plans for the future, and the conviction to work towards it, choosing to pursue a career in law, which means that he has a long road towards becoming an expert in the field ahead of him. He manages to get into a law programme at Harvard, which he soon…
Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
War films take many different forms, so to classify them as some homogenous mass (normally restricted to the specific war being shown), is one of cinema’s biggest challenges, at least on the part of those who tend to see them all as being part-and-parcel of the same ideas. Like any genre, there has been a…
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
At the perfect intersection between film noir and melodrama exists a film that has somehow come to be definitive of both of them, and perhaps even more, of an entire era of filmmaking in general. Leave Her to Heaven is a strange case of a film – directed by John M. Stahl, one of the…
Touch of Evil (1958)
By the time Orson Welles made Touch of Evil, the film noir genre was in its final stages – the peak wasn’t quite over yet, but it was gradually becoming clear that the genre that had ruled over much of Hollywood for roughly two decades was slowly going out of fashion, especially with the spectre…
I Married a Strange Person! (1997)
When it comes to the work of Bill Plympton, there is often a lot to unpack. In some instances, it’s sometimes better to just dispose of all the luggage in general, since dissecting every frame of his striking animated films is a fascinating, but incredibly challenging task – but for anyone with as twisted a…
Nomadland (2020)
Nomadland is the kind of film that really only comes around once or twice in a decade, one that manages to be so profound and understanding in its exploration of the human condition, the very act of just witnessing it seems close to a privilege. Chloé Zhao has been steadily building herself to becoming one…
The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020)
Somewhere in the picturesque region of Lake Como stands an impressive mansion, to which art critic and writer James Figueras (Claes Bang) has been summoned to meet with the rambunctious Joseph Cassidy (Sir Mick Jagger), a world-renowned art dealer and collector who has a reputation for wanting only the finest works in his expansive collection….
The Postmodern Pelican 