Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman (1961) opens like a grand theatre production, as we, the audience, are sat surrounded by darkness, in anticipation for the show to begin. An orchestra is heard warming up, a conductor is heard...
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows doesn’t particularly add anything new to the discussion of horror convention. Its central themes are as you might expect. The film deals with teen protagonists, with gruesome deaths, with sexual encounters, coming-of-age awakenings, and its...
Siegfried Kracauer – born February 8th, 1889 – was a landmark film theorist, who in 1960, released his expansive book on film, Theory of Film. The book outlines and explores cinema as, “The Redemption of Physical Reality,” as described in...
Solovki Power, Marina Goldovskaya’s 1988 documentary film, was one of the first to look into the extremely sensitive subject of the “Gulag”, a criminal government agency that controlled a huge collection of forced labour camps in the Soviet Union between...
The short sequence from the film discussed in this essay can be found online here. The years between 1958-62 saw a huge shift in modern Italy’s economic and social structure. The country was expanding its industrial status and power at...
Until recent years, cinema had always held a large artistic dominance over television. The cinema has always been home to huge spectacle films that, for the most part, remain firmly on top of the world’s entertainment outlets in terms of...
Now and then, we all need an inspirational reminder of how wonderful cinema can be at its very best. With his 2011, 15-hour essay film The Story of Film, Mark Cousins delivered this inspiration by the bucket load. Watching The...
Francesca Gregorini’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominated film, The Truth About Emanuel, is centered on two conflicting personal traumas that collide in deeply emotional and disturbing ways. The film is, at times, a suspenseful and effective thriller, combining competent filmmaking...