One principle that I try and employ daily is to live a life so unpredictable, adventurous and interesting that Werner Herzog will one day be compelled to make one of his overly dramatic but achingly beautiful (and occasionally very funny) documentaries about it. We’d all be far more interesting if we lived by such a…
School Daze (1988)
When we think about the early career of Spike Lee, the focus is usually on two of the films he made in the 1980s – She’s Gotta Have It, widely considered one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time, and the brilliant Do the Right Thing, which is one of a small handful of…
Joika (2023)
At some point in our lives, we all have a dream in which we find ourselves in a strange place without any idea of how we got there, or any indication of the way to escape, and every step forward we take makes us feel more isolated and alone. In the case of Joy Womack,…
In the Gloaming (1997)
While it is difficult to conceive of now that it has attained a level of prestige that it never had before, there was a time in which television was seen as an inferior medium – the delineation between movie stars and television actors was broad and took a lot of talent, effort and finagling to…
Rustin (2023)
One of the great unheralded heroes of the Civil Rights Movement is Bayard Rustin, who has only started to receive recognition in recent years, with his revolutionary efforts to bring equality to marginalized groups in the United States being beyond admirable, but rarely given the attention they deserved at the time. However, we have seen…
Life After Beth (2014)
Being in any kind of relationship can be hard work – and it’s even more difficult when your recently deceased partner returns from the dead as a reanimated corpse, completely oblivious to the fact that she had supposedly crossed into the ultimate inevitability, returning as a result of some otherworldly occurrence that begins to sweep…
Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023)
One of the great quirks of 20th century culture is that there were two public figures with the name Albert Einstein – an iconic physicist who made invaluable contributions to the world of science, and the other a comedian and actor who changed the face of comedy over the past few decades, and therefore both…
Frankenstein (1931)
When we speak about horror across both film and literature, there are two names we cannot ignore – Mary Shelley, the incredibly talented young writer who conceived of the subject of a mad scientist who decided that he would use all of his skills to bring his creation to life, and James Whale, who took…
Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)
I’d assume that we all tend to have the fantastical idea of being given the chance to start a new life, one filled with luxury and excess that our ordinary minds could never truly comprehend as being possible. In the case of Mrs. Winterbourne, Richard Benjamin’s strange but oddly compelling adaptation of the novel I…
Human Capital (2013)
It only takes a single moment or one ill-timed decision to change the course of one’s entire life, which is a concept that we should all be familiar with, either through firsthand experience or by proxy, since we all inevitably hear stories of people whose entire future was changed (whether for better or worse) in…
The Postmodern Pelican 