With what is undeniably one of his masterworks, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, Albert Lewin did something quite astonishing – he took a very formal premise garnered from a classic French text and morphed it into a remarkable achievement, a positively riveting affair that is scandalous without being cheap, and exhilarating without losing its…
An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)
A few years ago, I was one of the most ardent supporters of Jim Hosking’s solo directorial debut, The Greasy Strangler. It was a film that appealed to me based on my adoration for the trashy transgression of John Waters and his rebellious contemporaries in the underground film industry, as well as someone who really…
Juliet, Naked (2018)
Juliet, Naked doesn’t do or say anything we have not seen countless times before. In many ways, it is a traditional, by-the-numbers romantic comedy that we has been made so many times throughout the years. Yet, how is it possible that such a conventional film manages to be one of the very best of the…
Three Identical Strangers (2018)
Many of us have often fantasized about the possibility of turning the corner and being confronted with ourselves. It is a common belief that somewhere in the world, we have a doppelganger, and the likelihood of us meeting this person who is identical to us is astronomically small, but it is nonetheless an enduring and…
Searching (2018)
David Kim (John Cho) is an ordinary man living in San Jose with his daughter, Margot (Michelle La), the archetypal teenage girl who loves her friends and is constantly frustrated with her father, who has raised her single-handedly since the death of her mother and David’s wife. However, when Margot doesn’t return home one evening,…
First Man (2018)
When I opted to watch First Man, I was doing it for a number of reasons: my loyalty towards Damien Chazelle, who I find to be a massively talented filmmaker (and one that, despite the criticisms of his detractors, has not come close to peaking yet, even if his breakthrough moments with Whiplash and La…
Dispersed Clouds (1951)
Dispersed Clouds is the kind of film that makes me truly appreciate cinema – a small and intimate social drama that has an explosively powerful message at its core and an execution that understands the human condition with incredible profundity, a film that always does more than it says and ends up being a magnificent…
Scorpio Rising (1963)
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” ~ Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” In the history of experimental cinema, very…
The Tall Guy (1989)
A few years ago, when I was still a cinematic neophyte, I was at a second-hand bookstore and I found a book entitled Variety: Comedy Movies, a collection of capsule reviews written by the critics of Variety over the course of a few decades. At the age of only about thirteen, I didn’t care too…
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
Gus Van Sant is as diverse a director as you can get because he has shown himself to be capable of making astonishing films and films so bad, they transcend the concept of mediocrity and become something unbearable. His most recent film, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot is somewhere in between, and…
The Postmodern Pelican 