Isn’t Isabelle Huppert just the greatest actress in the world? While this may seem unprofessionally hyperbolic, I absolutely adore her, and I believe her to be one of the most extraordinary performers to ever work in cinema, due to her relentless brilliance across genres. Many have debated her finest hour, with quite a bit of…
Walker (1987)
Here is something I consider to be a fact: Alex Cox made some of the best films of the 1980s. Both Repo Man, an urban satire that blended suburban paranoia with science fiction, and Sid & Nancy, one of the greatest musical biopics of all time, centered around the iconic Sid Vicious and his tragically…
They Came Together (2014)
I have to say, there is something about the traditional romantic comedy formula that can work on occasion, but more often than not, it does not. There are very few genres of films as utterly and boringly predictable as the romantic comedy because it seems like they are all operating from a set of the…
Coco (2017)
Pixar has done it again, and they have yet to do it better than they did here. After nearly a decade of making good (but not entirely brilliant) films, they produced Coco, one of the most endearing and beautiful films Pixar has ever made, and undeniably one of their greatest works to date. It is…
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
I really love Dog Day Afternoon. Every year or so, I make a ritual of it to revisit this film, and on each viewing, without fail, I find it more and more wonderful, and its complexities as a subversive crime drama are only made more clear, as well as this film’s position as the darkest…
Bad Moms (2016)
Bad Moms is the kind of comedy film that is made far too often, and despite their radical popularity and mainstream appeal, they are usually not particularly good cinema. A domestic or suburban comedy that sees a subversion of archetypal gender or societal roles where expectations are subverted in favor of bawdy and sometimes excessively…
Suburbicon (2017)
Here are a few things that I love: 1950s suburban nostalgia, scathingly dark social satire and murder mysteries. Here is something I don’t love: Suburbicon. It is a film that should have been a lot better, and considering the plethora of talent in front of and behind the camera. Suburbicon is a film that had…
The Elephant Man (1980)
Here’s a statement I haven’t made abundantly clear several times before: I utterly admire David Lynch. I admire how he is one of the most important filmmakers to ever live, how he helped define both surrealism and independent cinema, and how he has been a cinematic iconoclast who has broken boundaries for what is possible…
Good Time (2017)
Ever seen a film so great, that it makes you wonder whether or not you’ll ever see a better film? There are quite a few cinematic experiences whereby I have been absolutely in awe of the mastery and brilliance behind the filmmaking, where my adoration for cinema is confirmed so completely and fully, and every…
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)
Diane Arbus was an extraordinarily talented artist, and her legacy as one of the most profoundly meaningful photographers to ever live continues to influence artists interested in humanity to this day. I know I have been inspired by Arbus, and many others have been as well. Her relentless provocation of form and content in her…
The Postmodern Pelican 