Awards and nominations are certainly not the safest way to measure an artist’s caliber, and the Oscars are the epitome of this assumption, since there have been numerous occasions over the years where great actors were completely snubbed by the Academy. Although it is a fact that sometimes there are too many noteworthy performances in […]
Tony Scott was a filmmaker who requires a lot of thought before compiling a top 10 list of his features. Not that there’s not enough to form a thoughtful and complete list, but because there’s too many phenomenal pieces of cinema competing with each other for space. A maximalist in every sense of the word, […]
After the imaginative, innovative, free-spirited and progressive 1960s, the European cinema was ready to take the international stage in the way which had been promising to do since the 1950s. In the US, the era known as The New Hollywood had finally brought that country into line with the movements which had originated in Europe […]
Every year in film has its highs and lows. Some great movies, some decent, the awful ones and maybe a masterpiece. If years were animals, then 2009 would be a beautiful unicorn, created by a number of master directors who, for some reason, decided to release their movies in the same 365-day period. This wonderful […]
In every cranny, every crevice, every corner of the Earth, there is darkness. There are shadows too in that Great Southern Land of ragged mountain ranges and of droughts and flooding rains. In contrast to the Victorian and Southern Gothic – which conventionally focused on the evil associated with cramped, urban spaces or ghostly, old […]
The advent of sharing platforms and greater access to online media the world over means that cinefiles are paying much closer attention to Middle Eastern cinema than ever before. While Dariush Mehrjui’s 1969 masterpiece The Cow is often labelled as single-handedly pioneering the Iranian New Wave, nothing can compare to the worldwide acclaim that accompanied […]