Émilie (Catherine Deneuve) and Antoine (Daniel Auteuil) are middle-aged siblings that live radically different lives. She is a successful lawyer who is in an unhappy marriage with her legal partner (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), who are together only for the sake of their children (Chiara Mastroianni and Anthony Prada), who are now adults in their own right…
David and Lisa (1962)
Something that has become quite apparent as I’ve worked through the career of Frank Perry in order to shed light on him as one of the most underpraised American masters, is that as he progressed in the industry, he became a better filmmaker. His first films were slightly weaker and far less-interesting that some of…
When Pigs Fly (1993)
Set in an indeterminate location somewhere in a seaside region of America, we’re introduced to Marty (Alfred Molina), a former jazz musician who has now lost his way, and has ended up wasting the best years of his life soaked in alcohol and teaching children how to play the piano. However, despite his sad existence,…
Teenage Yakuza (1962)
Seijun Suzuki is a filmmaker whose work has always impressed and terrified me in equal measure – while his methods as a director seem perfectly-calibrated to the abstract approach that has become acceptable in the Japanese film industry in the past few decades, looking at his work from the perspective of the time in which…
Bacurau (2020)
Not since Alejandro Jodorowsky made El Topo in 1970 has there been a western film as beautifully deranged as Bacurau, the incredibly audacious collaboration between Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, who work together to evoke the spirit of the dormant acid westerns that never fully manifested as a feasible area of filmmaking in their…
Les Visiteurs (1993)
There are some mysteries that I don’t think we’ll ever truly know the answers to – who built Stonehenge? What is the meaning of life? Are we alone in the universe? However, perhaps the question that has troubled me the most recently is this: who was demented enough to approve the making of Les Visiteurs?…
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
Once you’re a canonical stalwart of the film industry, one’s entire career is open for analysis, with the earliest works of some of the greatest directors in history being quite fascinating, if only for the sake of seeing where their style originates. When he was hired to direct an adaptation of Alice Doesn’t Live Here…
Family Romance, LLC (2020)
Yuichi (Yuichi Ishii) is a mild-mannered entrepreneur whose business is gradually becoming quite a formidable force in contemporary Tokyo. His job description is simple: he pretends to be people for a living. He calls his company “Family Romance”, where he and his colleague (Takashi Nakatani) spend their days completing contractual obligations by a variety of…
Judex (1963)
Whatever it was that compelled Georges Franju to make Judex, it worked out remarkably well, as he put together one of the most fascinating crime films of the 1960s, and a work that still holds up as a remarkable piece of alternative French filmmaking that essentially defined the director’s entire career and made him one…
Irma la Douce (1963)
Billy Wilder could do absolutely anything – his versatility as a director made him a perfect fit for any kind of film. However, despite taking numerous forays into different genres, he did tend to understand where his strengths lay, and while there isn’t a single kind of film that defines him as an artist, some…
The Postmodern Pelican 