Falling in love can be a beautiful experience, but it comes with a few challenging moments – and many will say that one of the most nerve-racking is the process of meeting the parents. While it is usually a pleasant and relatively painless affair in hindsight, the anxiety and fear of trying to impress your…
Tag: comedy
Once Upon a Time (1944)
We have seemingly lost the art of whimsy when it comes to much of contemporary cinema. We tend to prioritise realism over eccentricity, which may lend modern films a more authentic feeling, but at the expense of the joy of seeing radically strange films that do often tend to be slightly more offbeat, but in…
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006)
As the general principle of filmmaking goes, sometimes the projects you deserve are the ones you make yourself. There are certain artists – particularly actors – who find themselves typecast in parts that feel very limiting and one-dimensional, and it’s only through setting out to write their own material and get it produced that they…
Don Jon (2013)
As easy (and perhaps even fun) as it may be to pick apart Don Jon, we really have to hand it to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who went out on a limb in his directorial debut and made a comedy that may be filled with imperfections, but compensates for it through some very interesting decisions made as…
That Uncertain Feeling (1941)
Even the greatest artists have works that are less successful than others, and Ernst Lubitsch is not an exception. It isn’t even a matter of him ever having made a truly bad film, or even one that wasn’t worth watching, but rather that there are a few that pale in comparison to some of his…
Ladies First (2026)
For about as long as we’ve been exploring social and cultural dynamics on screen, there have been instances where someone has an idea to subvert expectations and look at a subject from a very different perspective. One of the most common areas in which we find this happening is in works that propose alternative realities,…
If I Was Honest (1942)
While his name may be somewhat obscure to some, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia is a vitally important figure in the history of Italian cinema, specifically if we are looking at a specific era in the nation’s artistic output. One of its most cherished figures in terms of comedy, Bragaglia was a fascinating individual, since his career…
Getting Any? (1994)
You cannot underestimate the lengths to which someone will go to satisfy their cravings, regardless of the specific desire and how they tend to be acquired. In the case of Getting Any? (Japanese: みんな～やってるか!), Takeshi Kitano asks similar questions and sets out to provide some answers in the process, which he does in the form…
Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
Falling in love with someone unexpectedly can already be quite a challenge, and it only becomes more excruciatingly difficult when the person who grows into the object of your affections proves to have manufactured the entire situation as part of some scheme to bamboozle and bewilder. This is the core narrative foundation of Magic in…
I’ll Do Anything (1994)
By the time it reached the mid-1990s, James L. Brooks was in a good place in Hollywood – he had directed some of the most notable films of the 1980s in the form of Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, had radical successes with shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons…
The Postmodern Pelican 