Paris Pitman Jr. (Kirk Douglas) is a well-known scoundrel who makes his living fleecing rich people of their fortunes. However, he’s not infallible, and one scheme results in him being caught and sent to a penitentiary, where he becomes one of a motley crew of bandits and criminals under the watchful eye of the new…
Knives Out (2019)
The murder mystery is a sub-genre of storytelling that has been popular for nearly as long as stories have been told. Stretching from the earliest days of Greek tragedies, straight through to the Shakespearean era, right into the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and their various narrative offspring such as the hardboiled…
Nobody’s Perfect (2019)
Gérard (Gérard Depardieu) is a middle-aged mechanic in a bit of a crisis – his marriage is plagued by infidelity, and he’s on the verge of being abandoned by his wife (Françoise Lépine), a lascivious woman who openly demonstrates her disdain for her spouse through her intense flirtations with any man who shows her any…
The Good Liar (2019)
I had a strange experience with The Good Liar, which exemplifies the perils of listening to the public discourse and allowing it to construct your opinions prior to seeing something. The Good Liar is a film that was met with such ambivalence upon release, it seemed almost contradictory to what I’d have hoped it would…
Motherless Brooklyn (2019)
Despite the past few decades seeing many filmmakers appropriating some elements of it, the film noir genre has all but faded away, at least in its most distilled form. The neo-noir has replaced it and given audiences some of the most enthralling films in the genre, but the traditional noir has entirely disappeared, becoming a…
Les Misérables (2020)
“There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators” This powerful quote was written by Victor Hugo and appears in his seminal masterwork, Les Misérables. They’re also the final words of another piece that appropriates the title of Hugo’s novel, as well as some of its underlying themes…
The Irishman (2019)
The Irishman is not just a gangster film. It’s an intricate cultural epic that functions as a darkly comical meditation on crime, ageing, the role of masculinity throughout the twentieth century and ultimately, death, both that of inflicting and experiencing it. Martin Scorsese presents us with perhaps his finest film in decades, a work of…
Greener Grass (2019)
Imagine an ordinary suburb somewhere in the American Midwest, sometime in the past, present or future. It’s an idyllic place that could be absolutely anywhere – yet, there’s something strange about this community. The adults all wear braces on their teeth for undisclosed reasons, residents drive golf carts through the streets lined with identical houses,…
Varda by Agnès (2019)
I’m not going to eulogize Agnès Varda in this review. Despite the fact that she’s an artist who means a considerable amount to me, and considering this is her final (and perhaps most personal) film, it seems inappropriate to use this space as one to lament her dying – not only because I’ve already written…
Enough Said (2013)
Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a divorced masseuse who makes her living through liaising with many of the suburban stereotypes she often wishes she could escape in her small community. When she’s not mingling with her two married friends (Toni Collette and Ben Falcone), she’s the mother of a daughter who is about to embark on…
The Postmodern Pelican 