Shutter Island was shuffled from an intended fall 2009 release date to February 2010, which changed the its profile from Oscar-season prestige picture to a late-winter thriller with low expectations (a studio delaying a film is often a sign of a lack of confidence), but it has proven to be a sound business decision; though [...]

“Even the music makes me want to kill myself,” said a man a few rows down from me during the closing credits. I laughed; sometimes someone just says it all.
But being depressing is only one of the problems with A Single Man, helmed by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford. Watching it, you can see that Ford [...]

John Schlesinger’s Darling is the pure embodiment of swinging London in the 60s. In certain respects it plays like a time capsule, capturing and locked in a particular moment in time. In other ways it transcends its period, creating something that remains compelling and engaging, a film that seems at times to step out of [...]

On September 11 1999, when the first reports of the attack on the World Trade Centre started pouring in, it seemed too unreal to be true. After the dust settled, the media started rifling through the bookshelves of contemporary extreme fiction to find parallels. It turned out, none of their nightmarish plotlines could come close [...]

What if you had a passion for doing something you were terrible at? Would you make it your life’s work regardless, or would you shove The Dream down under a pile of Get Real? Most people would do the latter. “When I grow up I want to…” says everybody, but hardly anybody actually grows up [...]

Four stories, each intense and tragic, all connected in some way to relate a singular narrative. Many films are told this way – director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu often constructs his films in this way – but few are as worthy of celebration as Babel. Taking its name from the Tower of Babel, which in the [...]

If you know even a little about the premise of Funny Games - you start dreading what you are going to witness from the first frame itself. This fact alone is a commentary on how violence, and the expectation of violence has seeped into our consciousness - almost to a point where we dread its [...]

The important question The Cove doesn’t answer, because the filmmakers can only venture to guess, is why? The documentary showcases such a strange stubbornness on the part of the Japanese government, working in defense of a minority of unscrupulous fishermen, for the trade of goods that make only a small amount of money and poison [...]

A film like Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion is difficult to approach so long after the fact as having been discussed and dissected for decades by film critics and scholars, it’s impossible to say anything new about it. Released in 1937, it was immediately embraced by the film community, becoming the first non-English film ever nominated [...]

There comes a moment in some movies after which it can do no wrong. In (500) Days of Summer, it’s a split-screen sequence that contrasts romantic hero Tom Hansen’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) heightened expectations for a party with the disappointing reality. It’s whimsical in its construction, but so sad in its effect. Like the rest of [...]