“His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them” Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley Patricia Highsmith occupies quite a peculiar place in the history of English literature – her works are embraced as wildly entertaining and genuinely daring pieces of writing, with stories that strike a…
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Fear is a fascinating topic, and one that has intrigued everyone from existential philosophers to eccentric artists for centuries, with the idea of something intangible or unlikely being able to have such a firm grasp on one’s psychological state. It is one of the only emotions that can be produced entirely organically by our psyche…
Lousy Carter (2024)
If there was ever a character who defined the belief that life is filled with suffering and sadness, and it is also far too short, it would be the hapless, down-on-his-luck protagonist of Bob Byington’s brilliant and subversive Lousy Carter, in which we are introduced to the titular character, a failed (although he may prefer…
Romance on the High Seas (1948)
Throughout its long and storied history, Hollywood has made countless remarkable films that tell important and impactful stories, provoking thought and stirring conversation with discourse around a range of deep themes. Romance on the High Seas is not one of these films – instead, it is an outrageous, vaguely absurd musical comedy that is about…
The Woman Chaser (1999)
There’s a very narrow boundary between paying homage to a genre of film, and fully becoming part of it in itself – and when it comes to The Woman Chaser, the distinction has never been more clear. A relatively underseen (some may even say obscure) dark comedy produced in the late 1990s by a director…
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)
In the opening scene of his masterpiece Annie Hall, Woody Allen provides us with a quote that has gone on to become iconic: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering, and it’s all over much too soon”, which serves to be a perfect summary of life for those who have adopted it as their…
Vagabond (1985)
The sight of a young woman walking through the pastoral winelands of rural France remains one of the most enduring and complex images in the history of cinema, and is the foundation on which Agnès Varda builds Vagabond (French: Sans toit ni loi), which remains one of her signature films, and one that has come…
The Little Foxes (1941)
Misery loves family – and you’ll find few families whose entire existence is more propelled by sheer conflict than the Giddens, who spend their days bickering about the future, genuinely believing it is their birthright to be the embodiment of wealth and affluence, to the point of causing a range of crises within the family…
My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
As far as the canon of great romantic comedies goes, you will struggle to find any more iconic than My Best Friend’s Wedding, which has come to be viewed as one of the most effective entries into a genre that has become somewhat oversaturated to the point where it has lost the spark that made…
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023)
There is a quote I adore by Friedrich Nietzsche, who boldly proclaimed that “without music, life would be a mistake” – I’ve constructed many conversations around the power of music in the past, and it bears as much relevance today as it did when the words were first spoken. To be a musician is to…
The Postmodern Pelican 