The past few months have been quite different from the usual for most of us. The lockdown and the social distancing measures have had a significant and often devastating impact on many people’s lives and on the economy. Without wanting to minimise the hardship of anyone who has lost loved ones or their income, [...]
Guido Anselmi, the main character in 8½, has often been described as Fellini’s alter-ego. The director’s eighth production (hence the name of the film) is a dreamy and poetic account of a filmmaker’s creative block, and it is also, arguably, a journey into his personality. This is quite accurate in that most of Fellini’s [...]
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin said that ‘great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts’, the one of their deeds, the one of their words and the one of their art; and ‘of all three the only trustworthy one is the last’. We take it as a given that the cultural inheritance of [...]
Spoilers about The Young Pope and The New Pope ahead. The acclaimed Italian writer and director Paolo Sorrentino, who won the academy award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014 for his La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), seems to have made a productive transition to television. He both penned and directed a [...]
Every aspect of Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke’s surrealist work ‘The Lighthouse’ pushes limits. From its dark humour to its physical claustrophobia, the film continuously pushes us away and then pulls us back in. Released by A24 studios, ‘The Lighthouse’ depicts a lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) and a seasonal worker (Robert Pattinson) who must [...]
