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Priscilla (2023)
So intoxicating is the allure of fame in Priscilla that by the time Elvis Presley’s naïve future wife is trapped behind the gates of Graceland, she can barely distinguish between its privileges, constraints, and everyday banalities, as Sofia Coppola blends each into musical montages and dreamy vignettes that beg the question – why did he…
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Maestro (2023)
To work as both a conductor and composer is to live two separate lives, Leonard Bernstein ruminates in Maestro, and it is this duality which Bradley Cooper reverberates all through his biopic of the great musician, revealing with sweeping passion and subdued restraint the contradictions that lie at the heart of genius.
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The Holdovers (2023)
It is almost impossible not to give into the retro, festive charm of The Holdovers, as through its unlikely pairing of a troubled student and his cantankerous history teacher over the Christmas break, Alexander Payne transforms the loneliest holiday of the year into a season warmly dedicated to its most distant outcasts.
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Tom Jones (1963)
Tony Richardson’s adaptation of classic novel Tom Jones is imbued with the rebellious spirit of the young maverick himself, throwing out the playbook of cinematic convention to skilfully blend highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick in its coming-of-age narrative, while finding comfort in the frivolities of an absurdly unpredictable world.
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Teorema (1968)
The ease with which one mysterious Visitor falls into the life of a bourgeoisie family in Teorema is surprisingly intimate, but his spiritual and sexual influence is also a catalyst for seismic shifts in their superficial lives, as Pier Paolo Pasolini strips away the material distractions of class, capitalism, and religion to expose the emptiness…
