Film Reviews

Penny Serenade (1941) is a quintessential example of Hollywood’s Golden Age melodrama: a tender, emotionally rich portrait of a marriage tested by time, tragedy, and the unpredictable turns of life. Directed by George Stevens, known for his mastery of both comedy and drama, and starring the formidable pairing of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, the film is a deeply moving meditation on love, loss, and perseverance.

The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is one of the most dazzlingly strange and stylistically radical entries in the American film noir canon. Directed, written, and starred in by Orson Welles, the film is a baroque fever dream of betrayal, sexual obsession, and psychological disintegration, cloaked in noir trappings but pulsating with the director’s anarchic sensibility.

Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) stands as one of the darkest and most subversive entries in the American film noir canon. On the surface, it's a taut crime thriller about a cop battling a web of corruption—but beneath its hardboiled plot and terse dialogue lies a smoldering fury about systemic rot, male violence, and the cost of moral conviction. It’s a film as explosive as its title, seething with tension and uncompromising in its depiction of brutality—especially against w

Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) is a provocative, stylized thriller that operates simultaneously as homage, erotic fantasy, psychological horror, and transgressive spectacle. Positioned squarely in the tradition of Hitchcockian suspense, the film draws heavily from Psycho (1960) in structure, theme, and visual language, but overlays that foundation with De Palma’s distinct cinematic bravado—split screens, dreamlike slow motion, voyeuristic framing, and a swirling Pino

Klute (1971) is a seminal work of American cinema that defies genre boundaries and expectations. On the surface, it’s a detective thriller—part of what would become director Alan J. Pakula’s "Paranoia Trilogy" alongside The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). But beneath that noir-inspired veneer lies a penetrating character study of a woman negotiating her autonomy, trauma, and identity in a world dominated by male power.

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) is a haunting and deeply introspective noir that transcends the conventions of the genre. Though it contains many of the hallmarks of classic film noir—moody lighting, a fatalistic tone, a mysterious murder—it is ultimately less a whodunit and more a searing portrait of psychological disintegration, toxic masculinity, and the tragic chasm between love and trust.

Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm is a taut, minimalist psychological thriller that wrings maximum tension from a deceptively simple setup. Set almost entirely on the open sea, the film traps its trio of characters—each battling their own past traumas and inner demons—within the isolating confines of a sailboat in the middle of nowhere.

Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) is a chilling masterpiece of American paranoia cinema—a film that captures the dread, disillusionment, and institutional mistrust that defined the post-Watergate, post-JFK era. Sandwiched between Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976), it forms the central entry in Pakula’s unofficial “paranoia trilogy,” and is perhaps the most stylistically daring and psychologically disturbing of the three.

Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977) is a haunting and hypnotic meditation on identity, corruption, and fatal friendship, filtered through the distinctive lens of 1970s European cinema. Loosely adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, the film represents an idiosyncratic and atmospheric take on the psychological thriller, prioritizing mood over momentum, and moral ambiguity over action.

Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) stands as one of the bleakest, most relentless noirs of the postwar era—a shadow-drenched tale of ambition, desperation, and doom set in a seedy, nightmarish version of London.

Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), is a taut, unnerving psychological thriller that helped usher in a new era of American cinema in the 1970s—where violence, sexuality, and psychological instability were explored with a rawness previously rare in mainstream film.

George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) is a masterful psychological thriller that delicately balances melodrama, gothic suspense, and noir-like tension. Adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, this MGM production is more than just a classic—it is the definitive screen version of the story and the origin of a term that would enter the lexicon as a metaphor for psychological manipulation: “gaslighting.”

Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) is a masterful debut feature—cool, precise, emotionally complex, and utterly distinctive. Though it’s nominally a crime film about a high-end safecracker and his attempt to escape “the life,” Thief is ultimately less about heists than about identity, masculinity, and the pursuit of control in a chaotic world.

John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980) is a searing, stylish, and deeply political British gangster film that not only redefined the genre in its homeland but also offered a startling mirror to the social and economic turmoil of late 1970s Britain.

Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) is a taut and fascinating post-war noir thriller—part espionage procedural, part gothic melodrama—that deserves more recognition than it typically receives in the director’s filmography.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) is a film that slithers beneath the manicured lawns of small-town Americana to expose a surreal and rotting underworld of violence, desire, and psychological disturbance. Bold, bizarre, and intensely provocative, Blue Velvet marked a turning point in Lynch’s career, solidifying his voice as one of modern cinema’s most original and transgressive.

Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (Le Locataire, 1976) is a slow-burning psychological horror film that crawls under your skin and lingers long after the credits roll. The third entry in what has been retrospectively dubbed Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (following Repulsion [1965] and Rosemary’s Baby [1968]), The Tenant is perhaps the most subtle and unsettling of the three.

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the quintessential entries in the film noir canon—a sharp, cynical, and tightly coiled crime thriller that set the standard for visual style, narrative structure, and moral ambiguity.

When Bambi premiered in 1942, the United States was in the early months of its involvement in World War II, and Disney’s animation studio was still recovering from labour disputes and the financial aftershocks of Fantasia and Pinocchio.

In 1969, amid the cultural thunderclap of the moon landing, the Woodstock festival, and the cresting waves of social revolution, a small animated film arrived in theatres with gentle colours and sad piano chords.