Louisa (Shirley MacLaine) is the world’s richest woman, she is willing to do absolutely anything to strip herself of that title. She was raised in comfortable poverty, and has always aspired to lead a very simple life, relying on nothing but the bare essentials – but as we see in the first few moments of…
Marnie (1964)
When you’re looking at someone whose output was as varied and prolific as Alfred Hitchcock, one tends to create tiers – and considering he is perhaps the greatest filmmaker to work in the English language, there are quite a few masterpieces littered throughout his career, as well as a few failures. Marnie is somewhere in…
Love Meetings (1964)
What is love? This is a question that has challenged philosophers and artists for about as love as we’ve been sentient – the movement away from procreation for necessity towards putting value into interpersonal relationships has been one that has provoked countless individuals and produced so many fascinating interpretations. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a multi-hyphenate…
In Safe Hands (2020)
The intersecting lives of a group of ordinary people are presented to us through In Safe Hands (French: Pupille), a beautifully-poetic story that seeks to explore humanity in its various forms. A baby is born, and his young mother (Leïla Muse) is adamant that she doesn’t want to keep him, for a number of reasons….
The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985)
Sergei Parajanov was truly one of the greatest artists across any medium. His films reflect so much deep understanding for life, always being poignant celebrations of the fragility of existence, channelled through some of the most gorgeous imagery ever committed to film. His penultimate completed film was The Legend of Suram Fortress (Georgian: ამბავი სურამის…
Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)
Doc Delaney (Burt Lancaster) and his wife Lola (Shirley Booth) are a middle-aged couple that have been married for over twenty years. They’re a seemingly idyllic couple – they live in a quaint suburban home and lead a remarkably simple life. Doc is a chiropractor who is beloved by the community, and Lola is a…
Shirley (2020)
Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) and his wife Rosie (Odessa Young) are on their way to Bennington, Vermont, where Fred will be starting a residency at the local university, under the guidance of Professor Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a revered academic known for his depth of knowledge of literature, and his notoriously challenging approach to…
A High Wind in Jamaica (1965)
Frederick and Alice Thornton (Nigel Davenport and Isabel Dean) are a pair of British merchant expatriates in Jamaica who are raising their five children in one of the small coastal towns that they occupy as part of the growing European settlement that shows very little sign of stopping, especially through the colonial expansion that is…
The Shop on Main Street (1965)
The Second World War continues to make its way across Europe, gradually taking over the lives of everyone, encroaching as far as the smallest villages of Czechoslovakia, which is where we situate ourselves here. Tóno Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is a humble craftsman who is perfectly content to live a very simple life as a carpenter,…
Notes on an Appearance (2018)
Notes on an Appearance is an inherently difficult film to understand, and also one of the fascinating works of contemporary postmodernism. It is necessary to once again bring out the taut quote by Lyotard, where he proclaims postmodernism, or rather what we generally consider to be the most succinct definition of it, as “incredulity towards…
The Postmodern Pelican 