Todd Solondz: The home as a battlefield in Happiness and Life During Wartime
In Happiness (1998), the ever-smiling Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), in her neat kitchen, is strongly reminiscent of the female ideal as…
Recent Posts
Lost Classic: Tony Williams’ Next of Kin (1982)
After languishing in obscurity for decades, Tony Williams’ cult horror oddity, Next of Kin (1982), has finally been released on…
The long way back to normality: Shohei Imamura’s The Eel
After serving eight years in prison for the murder of his wife, Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) is released on probation…
How Andrzej Wajda used cinema to reveal hidden truths about his nation
Andrzej Wajda started his career as a filmmaker in post-war Poland. His early films – A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Lotna and…
Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers: A journey into the Armani style of the 1990s
In 1980, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo launched Giorgio Armani’s career. The designer went on to revolutionize fashion, and menswear and…
Social criticism and the inner journey in Battle Royale
In one of the first sequences of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000), a group of boisterous pupils on…
Discover this generation-spanning drama about old age in the modern world
An angry-looking man hastily leaves a shabby house in the middle of nowhere, repeatedly throwing his walking stick to the…
Revisiting Gus Van Sant’s disturbing portrait of a high school shooting
Of the three films comprising Gus Van Sant’s so-called “Death Trilogy” (the others being 2002’s Gerry and 2005’s Last Days),…
Discover Kurosawa’s forgotten film about nuclear terror during the Cold War
Since the success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon at the International Film Festival in Venice in 1951 – which opened the…
