“Contemporary viewers may find themselves identifying a little too closely with downtrodden protagonist Sam Lowry, seeking his escape from the surveillance capitalist hellscape in an audio-visual dreamland of yesteryear.”
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“The gaunt, puppy-eyed protagonist of Nightcrawler (2014) is no more than a content purveyor of TV news, a regular guy descending to ever ghastlier depths, not at the behest of conventional incentives such as love, revenge, or fear, but of modern hustle culture. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom works as a ’stringer’, or freelance cameraman, hunting down the grisliest crime scenes in LA to shoot, sell, and even, perhaps, stage.”
Read More“Armed with the non-negotiable terms that the film would be Chinese language, and feature an entirely Asian and Asian-American cast, Wang was able to steer clear of soapiness or inauthenticity, in favour of an intimate mix of farce and melancholy.”
Read More“Monty Python and the Holy Grail teased out a persistent sense of homegrown, wilful eccentricity from its parodic portrayal of British lives ancient and modern, a sense which seems to have grown only more potent in intervening decades.”
Read More“The film’s ambiguous examination of the woman as victim- as the physical prey of men, and as a prisoner of her social and narrative context- demonstrates how Kurosawa’s psychological elements continue to resurface in unexpectedly familiar ways.”
Read MoreThe enduring cultural sway of The Princess Bride stems in a large part from its endless quotability - its torrent of snappy, adaptable comments on everything from “true wuv” to “land wars in Asia”.
Read More“Rather than punching down in the spirit of the era - as Craig Ferguson observed of Britney’s treatment, as a Platonic ideal of the White Chick - the Wayans brothers poke at broad swathes of aughts society for a dose of goofy nostalgia without the guilt.”
Read More“Making use of the grand cultural forces at his disposal- from chart-topping popular song to Hollywood icons- Hitchcock’s transatlantic remake pokes at the darkness beneath the external Technicolour sunshine of the post-war nuclear family, and wider society.”
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