At the center of Alex Taylor’s Spaceship is a group of cyber goth teenagers (which is apparently a thing now). These adolescents troll about expounding on the deeper meanings of life, toiling inconsequentially on the tenants of suicide, and generally not concerning…
Monty Python’s Life of Brian has been called many things, including brilliant, irreverent and even blasphemous. Of the three, only the last one is incorrect. Yes, the film pokes fun at the legend of Jesus, but not directly and more mocks blind faith and people who talk a good game but do nothing. The film garnered the…
The intrepid duo of Wallace and Gromit made their debut in 1989 with the animated short “A Grand Day Out,” which first appeared on the film festival circuit, then found its way to the BBC for a Christmas Day showing. Creator Nick Park had begun work on the stop-motion short in 1982 while at university, and continued working…
There is much to be said about Terry Gilliam’s epic dystopian masterpiece Brazil, not the least of which is the masterful way Gilliam tells the story of an imaginative man shackled by the machine of conformity. It’s also amazing that the film was made at all, considering the now-legendary amount of studio intervention that went so…
Tom Hardy’s dual performance in Legend as real-life identical twin gangster brothers Ronald and Reginald Kray is a remarkable one. The film itself, unfortunately, does not live up to its title. Narrated by Reggie’s wife Francis (Emily Browning), we watch as the Kray brothers rule…
The elegant romance Carol directed by Todd Haynes premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year to critical acclaim and already kicked off early Oscar speculations due to high praise for both actresses, including the Award for Best Actress for Rooney Mara for her performance. The Oscar buzz for both Rooney Mara and…
With the arrival of every James Bond comes a wealth of expectation, speculation and anticipation. SPECTRE, however, has the near-impossible task of both following and expanding upon Skyfall, one of the character’s finest filmic adventures to date. Director…
A good writer leaves a lot for a reader’s imagination to let them parse the narrative vision in their own way. A good director doesn’t coddle their audiences either. They are highly aware that there are two cinemas you must consider: the screen they present their viewer with, and the screen within the viewer’s mind. In the case of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, there are…
Although this is the first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film I’ve been treated to, his name does come with a reputation of expecting the unexpected. The truth is Cemetery Of Splendour is cinematic poetry in storytelling.
Of all the psychological dramas of the 1940s, George Cukor’s Gaslight stands out as one of the best. This could be due to Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance or Cukor’s inspired direction, but more likely it’s because it is possibly the most devious of them. This is also a rare American remake that is better than the original…