One of the bravest and often most challenging parts of making a film is realising that every piece of art one creates is rooted in the personal, even if it isn’t intentional. We all tell stories that resonate with us, and even the most abstract and experimental works are often formed as a result of…
Tag: reviews
Urchin (2025)
In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag critically discussed how we position ourselves as empathetic beings, expressing our desire to help those who are less fortunate than us – but in the process, repeated exposure to those who are suffering can cause a psychological fatigue, even amongst those who genuinely set out…
Georgia (1995)
Independent cinema has had a long and storied history, but it cannot be viewed as a single endless stream, but rather a series of chapters, each one defined as something of a generation in a long journey towards negotiating the boundary between the mainstream and the arthouse. One of the most fascinating, at least in…
Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007)
Purely based on logic, it seems implausible that there is any subject that could attract a range of notable names in the entertainment industry to gather for a discussion, in which this group includes the likes of Clint Eastwood and Sidney Poitier, to Joan Rivers and Chris Rock, and everyone in between. However, such a…
Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
“Images of the past overlap those of the present “ These words are spoken by Lina Soualem, whose voice is heard primarily as the narrator of her film Bye Bye Tiberias (Arabic: باي باي طبريا), in which she travels from her home in France to a small village in Palestine, in an effort to unearth…
Nouvelle Vague (1990)
Where does an artistic revolutionary go once the world has caught up with their ingenuity? Some are put out to pasture, fading into obscurity through struggling to come to terms with a rise in popularity, indicating that they were no longer symbols of the avant-garde and instead highly influential remnants of a bygone era. Others…
Red (2008)
When someone has experienced an unspeakable tragedy, there is very little that can be done to soothe a broken soul – but for some, accountability is more than enough to push them towards a place of healing. This isn’t always necessarily easy to acquire, especially not when it involves people who don’t understand the enormity…
They Live (1988)
The general principle behind satire is that it needs to occupy one of two extremes – either, it needs to be subtle enough that we don’t realize what is being conveyed until a crucial moment in which we encounter some major revelation, or it needs to be so glaringly obvious that there is never any…
Last Orders (2001)
“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” These words form perhaps the simplest but effective summary of what friendship represents – and surprisingly, it is not a contemporary quote, but rather found in the musings of the great philosopher Aristotle, who spoke about the concept of friendship with such beautiful and…
A Poet (2025)
Living the life of a creative person is not always easy – for every world-renowned artist, there are a thousand who genuinely believe that they have the potential to make it in the industry, but remain in obscurity for their entire lives. The reasons for this are complex – it could be a matter of…
The Postmodern Pelican 