Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson) is a young man who is lost in a world he doesn’t quite understand. He’s the self-professed “King of Staten Island”, based on his upbringing in the titular New York City borough, which he considers to be one of the most singularly uninteresting places in the country, yearning to get out,…
Last Holiday (1950)
“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” – no one truly knows where this popular adage comes from, but it been espoused by countless people across the decades, all of which remarks on the challenges that come with doing comedic work, and how it tends to be the most significant, but worthwhile challenge for any actor,…
End of Sentence (2020)
Frank Fogle (John Hawkes) has just lost his wife after a long battle with cancer. Before she passed on, she left Frank with one last task – to take a trip to her native Ireland with their son to scatter her ashes over a river that holds some significance to her. The problem is that…
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
We don’t need to escalate You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate You know we’ve got to find a way These lyrics have been etched into the public consciousness through Marvin Gaye’s seminal cry for order and understanding in “What’s Going On”, a song that relates quite significantly to…
Black Peter (1964)
Peter (Ladislav Jakim) is an aimless young man who seems to lack any sense of direction. He’s pressured by his parents (Jan Vostrčil and Božena Matušková) to get a job, particularly by his overbearing father, whose belief is that the only person worth any time is a working person and that one can’t truly be…
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
We’d all be privileged to know exactly what resided in the mind of Jacques Demy – I don’t think there are many filmmakers who placed as significant emphasis on both style and substance as him, with his films always being marvellous examples of both beautiful form and incredibly-compelling stories that traverse genres and conventions to…
What a Way to Go! (1964)
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 Postmodern Pelican 