A Beginner’s Guide To… Pedro Almodóvar
As he closes out his fourth decade directing feature films with the UK release of Pain and Glory - his twenty-first feature - this week, it feels an opportune moment to reflect on the virtuoso career of...
The Melancholy of the Outsider: Tim Burton’s Fantastical Worlds
Tim Burton returns this weekend with his 19th feature film as director: a live-action version of Dumbo. While the lingering fascination with his films, and the cultural lure of a reimagined Disney gem like...
In the White City: Remembering Bruno Ganz
The common access points to Bruno Ganz for many Anglo-American commentators seem to be his iconic performances in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987) and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2014). While those are...
Short of the Month: Bogeyman
https://vimeo.com/243452948 Often short films can feel gimmicky – little more than directorial calling-cards centred around singular visual conceits. Polish-Australian filmmaker Bianca Lucas, whose Before...
Into Heaven’s Mouth: Remembering Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También
If we include the about-to-be-released Roma, Alfonso Cuarón has only directed eight feature films across a near 30-year career. The reason for this relative slimness of output is likely to have many factors...
Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Fallacy of Slow Cinema
“Are we losing interest in everyday life?” says one young librarian to another in Kogonada’s superb Columbus – one of the finest films to hit UK cinemas this year. The comment comes at the end of an...
My Summer of Love: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Finest Hour
Pawel Pawlikowski, winner of the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Cold War, has become one of the world’s top contemporary auteurs almost by stealth. He’s not a filmmaker who...
The Brilliance of Juliette Binoche
Juliette Binoche. The name alone brings connotations of a very particular brand of imperious arthouse cinema. Seeing it in the opening credits is a near guarantor of a cerebral viewing experience; a patent by...
Unravelling The Genius Of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven
To younger audiences, Todd Haynes is probably better known for his Bob Dylan experimental tribute, I’m Not There (2007) and exquisite romantic melodrama, Carol (2015). In the early years of the new...
Remembering Morvern Callar: A Forgotten Gem of British Cinema
You Were Never Really Here, only Lynne Ramsay’s fourth feature film as director, comes nearly 20 years after the sensation of her debut release, Ratcatcher (1999). That trickle of productivity has its...
Why Sideways is Still Alexander Payne’s Finest Vintage
Alexander Payne, the great satirist of Middle American mores, returns this weekend with his latest ditty of wry social commentary, Downsizing. Often when a filmmaker establishes such a distinctive formula as...
Scene Stealers: Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver
Yesterday marked Martin Scorsese’s 75th birthday, and to mark the great man reaching three-quarters of a century, what better way to celebrate his enduring contribution to cinema than by recalling one of the...
Soderbergh’s Solaris: A Superior Hollywood Remake
Steven Soderbergh has always been a filmmaker who belies easy stereotyping. His prolificness and his chameleon-like ability to switch between genres, between the arthouse and the mainstream, have always made...
The Science of Ghosts: Cinematic Tales of Grief
Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts – Jacques Derrida Cinema has always seemed the ideal bedfellow for explorations of grief and loss. It’s ingrained in the very origins of the...
Stockholm, My Love – Review
British cinephile par excellence, Mark Cousins, returns with another of his ambitious and high-minded cine-essays (although this is technically fictional) centred on a specific geographical location. The...