Every family tends to have the designated dunce, the person who is always getting into scrapes and precarious situations, but who we still love regardless – and if you think your family doesn’t have one, I have some bad news for you. We are taught to love our families regardless of their imperfections, but sometimes…
Tag: movie-review
Friendship (2025)
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival” These words by C.S. Lewis can be found in his book Four Loves, his meditation on faith, friendship and life in general. It has always stood out to me as a…
Blackbird (2020)
While you may not know it by looking at her, but Lily (Susan Sarandon) is about to die. Afflicted with a rare, deadly disease that gradually causes her muscles to deteriorate, her prospects for leading a normal life grow increasingly sparse as the days progress. If she can’t live as herself, dying on her own…
Doomed at Sundown (1937)
Once you have seen enough of a particular genre, the work starts to blur together. It can seem very repetitive, especially if we are dealing with either the earlier years of Hollywood filmmaking or a genre that didn’t initially allow for much space for exploration and experimentation. Unfortunately, a film like Doomed at Sundown meets…
First Time Female Director (2024)
There is a general rule of thumb that drives the film industry – if an actor is around for long enough and dedicated to the craft of filmmaking, there will come a point where they endeavour to step behind the camera. This is oddly most prominent amongst comedians, since there is some kind of pipeline…
Bad Taste (1987)
Years before he came to be seen as the very definition of tenacity in the form of his endeavour to adapt the titanic novel The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was a lesser-known New Zealand filmmaker who simply wanted to direct stories that interested him, paying tribute to existing genres while forging his own…
Daddio (2024)
It may not be a regular occurrence (and has becoming increasingly more rare considering how internally we tend to live our lives in the digital era), but there is something profoundly beautiful about encountering a stranger with whom she share only a few moments, but which you still carry deep within your heart for a…
Earthworm Tractors (1936)
Capitalism can easily be reduced to a straightforward question: Do we live to make money, or do we make money to live? For the protagonist in Earthworm Tractors, based on the syndicated stories and later bestselling novels by William Hazlett Upson, both the stories and the novels somehow manage to be true. Alexander Botts, whose…
Everything’s Going to Be Great (2025)
For some life imitates art, while for others it is the inverse – they find solace in filtering their own perspectives, challenges and existential quandaries into the work they produce. This is something that we find Steven Rogers, a very gifted writer, exploring in the form of Everything’s Going to Be Great, in which he…
Seconds (1966)
There are a few truly universal experiences, but one that I would be surprised if we didn’t all share is the collective desire to lead a different life. We all have regrets and yearn for certain aspects of our existence to be different, even if only slightly, and anyone who has not had the fantasy…
The Postmodern Pelican 