Cinema Paradiso: A film dedicated to films

Cinema Paradiso: A film dedicated to films

Cinema Paradiso is a comforting film. It’s a cure for loneliness because it lifts you out of your reality and places you into a poignant and wistful one. However, once you get too close to the bliss that it emanates, it covers you in a blanket of melancholia and longing. The story is one...

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy

It may be that a film reminds you of a time spent in affection and the revelations it brings with it. But creating that cinematic language and fluency where a film can retain the yearning of a love reserved for a time ahead of yours is unique. Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is one such...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia

If what meets the eye is believable, and is believed, can it be a coincidence that what doesn’t meet the eye has had bad luck? It seems the objective here – of human actions and of human behavior – is that everything is a sneaky coincidence. Because if it isn’t, and if it were...

Thumbnail Placeholder

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

The neon signs, continuous rain, ethereal billboards, and the one-dimensionality of it all. Blade Runner is one of the strangest dystopian sci-fi films I’ve seen. The story hides well the humanity of humans and seeks, instead, to find the humanity of robots. Set in November 2019, the film fashions the future in a hedonistic...

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida

In my notes while watching this film, I wrote some lines, erased them, wrote over the split words, and found that what I wrote before, the first time, was right. “The quietness and stillness of strength speak volumes.” This is what Pawel Pawlikowski’s film, Ida, has given me. The understanding that a person’s display...