Before he was the cinematic stalwart he is seen as today, the creator of such inventive and brilliant visual odysseys such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Life of Pi, Ang Lee was just another young Taiwanese filmmaker crafting intimate dramas that portrayed his home country and its rapidly changing social and cultural situations…
Spotlight on a Murderer (1961)
Upon viewing Spotlight on a Murderer (French: Pleins feux sur l’assassin), I realized something – no matter how original the idea, or how gorgeous the visual aesthetic, a film means nothing if it isn’t executed well. Georges Franju will forever have his name engraved in the canon of great artists purely because of his brilliant…
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)
Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) is an Irish spinster who has recently taken occupancy in a small boarding house in Dublin. A profoundly lonely woman, she has been forced to be constantly on the move due to her diminishing funds, and the fact that her career as a piano teacher is hardly enough to sustain her,…
Greta (2019)
Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young woman who has recently moved to New York City, finds an abandoned bag on the subway. She decides to return it to its rightful owner, who turns out to be Greta (Isabelle Huppert), a friendly French piano teacher who is very grateful to the younger woman for her act…
Anima (2019)
I don’t normally review short films or visual albums unless they are particularly noteworthy, and my two previous forays into this realm of filmmaking – namely Child Gambino’s groundbreaking video for “This Is America” and Mike Mills’ extraordinary visual album he made in collaboration with The National, I Am Easy to Find – were astonishing…
The Marquise of O (1976)
A film set in Italy, filmed in German and made by a French director – The Marquise of O is an anomaly of a film, but in the best way possible. Éric Rohmer was a director whose output throughout his career was nothing short of extraordinary, both in the stories he told and how he…
I Only Want You to Love Me (1976)
Like any given year during the peak of his filmmaking, 1976 was quite a busy year for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This year, in particular, bears significance because three of his most notable films were all released then, each one of them extremely different in genre, story and even quality. Amongst the films he produced in…
Network (1976)
I first watched Network about a decade ago, when I initially sought it out after discovering that it is considered a seminal piece of New Hollywood filmmaking, and an essential example of satire. I thought it was a splendid film, but one that felt fundamentally cold and detached, and no matter how hard I tried,…
El desencanto (1976)
Over the past few decades, the private lives of some individuals have become increasingly public with the rise of reality television and more intimate documentaries. We can point to two specific early examples of personal life being public entertainment. The first is An American Family, the PBS documentary series broadcast in the early 1970s that…
Sebastiane (1976)
You can say quite a lot about Derek Jarman. You can accuse him of being a reckless cinematic provocateur, as well as hailing him as an artistic stalwart, a filmmaker and visual artist that approached tricky subjects such as human sexuality in relation to society in a time when it wasn’t entirely easy to get…
The Postmodern Pelican 