Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning, off-beat romance deftly explores themes such as isolation, miscommunication and the superficiality of modern media.
Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning, off-beat romance deftly explores themes such as isolation, miscommunication and the superficiality of modern media.
Krzysztof Kieślowski avoids all the clichés of doppelgängers, doubles and lookalikes to deliver a meditation on freedom.
Going into production, Gladiator had nothing near a finished script yet one simple change to the start of the story turned it into the greatest opera ever filmed.
Despite its title, Cold War is not an espionage thriller. Instead, Pawel Pawlikowski loosely based it on his parents’ lives. But it’s not a biopic either. So what is it?
While Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel broke genre convention, the Coens’ adaptation is a study in audiovisual chaos.
This western opened new frontiers for the genre; celebrity and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory telling of a Conquistador’s search for El Dorado etches a landscape of greed on the human face.
Long before it was revered as a masterpiece, F.W. Murnau’s radical reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel had to be saved from the furnaces.
Regarded as the greatest gangster picture of them all, the passing years continue to reveal new layers and meanings in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece.
Pather Panchali translates into English as Song of the Road, but the production was so arduous and fortuitous it should be called Song of Miracles.
Upon its release, Munich was attacked for historical inaccuracy, political naivety and moral equivalency. But it is one of Spielberg’s greatest works.
Alfonso Cuarón’s drug fuelled tale of two oversexed youths and an older woman on a road trip in search of a mythical beach results in a thesis on social connectivity.
As the title to Edward Yang’s masterpiece indicates, Yi Yi is a series of doubles; narrative, thematic, visual and aural, that deliver a subtle family portrait.
Cries and Whispers was Ingmar Bergman’s fourth colour film but with a palette of just black, white and red, he still painted deep emotions and vivid dreams.
Sergei Eisenstein devised montage for black and white and silent film. How have the elements of sound, colour and digital cinema extended his theories?
First seen as an eviscerating critique of Thatcherism, 30 years on it belongs with the MeToo and Time’s Up movements.
Released in 1971, critics bracketed Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a revisionist western. Truth is, the western has always been revising itself.
Upon its release, it seemed that Easy Rider typified the spirit of the nineteen-sixties. But it really should be viewed as the first film of the seventies.
Many films enjoy exaggerated reputations, but it is almost impossible to underestimate the beauty, truth and importance of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.
Rear Window, Vertigo, Blowup, Weekend, the Zapruder film and The Conversation are all to be seen and heard in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out.
How did a blasphemous, homosexual, Marxist, atheist manage to make the greatest film about the life of Jesus Christ?
William Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes are just some of the disparate influences on view in Thomas Vinterberg’s masterpiece.
Francois Truffaut once claimed ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’ were incompatible. Powell and Pressburger proved him wrong.
In ancient Greece, all violence took place off stage. How can filmmakers show the violence of the Holocaust without exploiting the memory of the victims?
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