Author Darragh O’Donoghue

The most memorable moment in Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls (1997) occurs nearly halfway through, as two veterans remember participating in the US Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Lillie Bro...

Archaic and awkward in its phrasing, the English title of Eien ni kimi wo aisu (I Love Thee For Good, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2009) refers to a wedding, and the wedding at the film’s centre is suitably archaic and a...

The first image of The Sugarland Express (1974) shuts down the mythic possibilities of the American open road even more decisively than Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough work Duel (1971), the TV movie wherein a m...

All Manila’s a stage in the cinema of Lino Brocka. The usual distinctions between public and private, individual and collective, blur to bewildering effect. This phenomenon reflects a sociological fact. Manila’...

If Suzuki Seijun had retired from filmmaking in the winter of 1962, he would be remembered – if at all – as an imaginative specialist who stretched the genres he worked in as far as they could go. His early cri...

In 1980, the iconic actress-turned-politician Nargis stood up in the Indian parliament and denounced the films of Satyajit Ray for exploiting poverty and shaming India. In a subsequent interview, she accused Ra...

“There is more to this than meets the eye,” observes police officer Lieutenant Chang Cheng (Chen Hui-Lou), one of the slippery protagonists of Kongshan Ling Yu (Raining in the Mountain, King Hu, 1979). He is ta...

“God save the Queen…” In 1952, Princess Elizabeth became the Queen of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Dominions, etc. With the UK suffering from the physical and financial cost of World War II, rationing ...

The traditional visual art of Japan – such as popular woodblock prints and handscrolls – was a shaping influence on the films of Yasuzō Masumura. He used its subject matter, disposition of space, and compositio...

In Une sale histoire (Jean Eustache, 1977), a dirty story is told – twice. The work comprises two notionally identical short films in which a middle-aged man narrates a story of erotic obsession to a mixed audi...

The landscape is never simply a landscape for the Taviani Brothers. Whether fertile or barren, and in Sardinia or Sunset Boulevard, the landscape is more than a picturesque accretion of fields, trees, valleys, ...

Is Anna (Pierre Koralnik, 1967) desperately modish or a critique of desperate modishness? Like most social satires, it prefers to have its cake and eat it. Anna depicts a world that is superficial, conformist, ...

What are the right words to discuss this? - Stephen Dwoskin on Gregory Markopoulos Advance Guard artists are so far in advance of their audiences that they often have to explain what it is that they are doing...

Lottie Lyell had her work cut out when she agreed to appear as the love interest of The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1919). The film was, and has usually been admired, as a bloke-ish affair. Its reputat...

In 1968, Juraj Jakubisko, a graduate of Prague’s legendary FAMU film academy and recent employee of the Laterna Magika theatre, presented his adaptation of Waiting for Godot (Čekají na Godota, 1965) at the Inte...

Jacques Audiard’s Les Olympiades (2021) is adapted from three stories by beloved Californian comics artist and illustrator Adrian Tomine.  At every point the comics and their film adaptation intersect, Audiard ...

Bombay cinema was my first film passion – starting with the Hindi film records our Indian neighbour constantly played when I was a child in late-1970s Dublin. Long before I was initiated into the mysteries of M...

b. 26 February 1937, Bombay, British India d. 1 March 1994, Bombay, India ‘No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up’ - Ramachandra Guha Prologue It is one of the most famous moment...

b. 26 February 1937, Bombay, British India d. 1 March 1994, Bombay, India ‘No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up’ - Ramachandra Guha Prologue It is one of the most famous mome...

A jungle in Thailand at night, filmed in one long shot. There are the murmurs of nature. Lights flash onto a clearing - the spotlights of a film crew. A pop song begins; a woman in white shuffles centre stage f...

At first it looks like we’re in for a Soviet Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A group of Red Army soldiers and a young woman on a farm celebrate the end of the Civil War, clown around, laugh, dance, shout. T...

What happens when the use of pop music is neither celebratory nor liberating? When it is the soundtrack to emotional pain and social oppression, and may be said to contribute to, or even generate such pain and ...

Qinawi, the anti-hero of Youssef Chahine’s international breakthrough, is introduced into the main narrative by indirection. First, the ‘lame’ newspaper seller at Cairo Central Station is presented through the ...

From its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, it was clear how deeply Through the Olive Trees was embedded in the past. It was the third and final part in what has come to be known as the Koker ...

In 2014 India elected Narendra Modi Prime Minister with a landslide.  A right-wing Hindu fundamentalist and former member of the elite, fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary organisation, Modi has ...

I was the magician’s apprentice … I was his psychotic sidekick, the boy wonder to murder’s masked man. This may read like a lurid Nick Cave fairytale, but it is in fact an extract from Etceteracide, an unpubli...

Much of the visual lexicon we associate with the term ‘Kafkaesque’ was established by Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial (1962) and Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Postava k podpírání (Joseph Kilián, 1963), ...

Max Ophuls has been called a humanist director, but if we define humanism as referring to the centrality of human activity to the universe, then he is the least humanist of directors. Characters in his films ma...

Cold War-era WR: misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dušan Makavejev, 1971) sets West against East with two opening sequences. In the first, Tuli Kupferberg shambles into a New York street and p...

The Mercenary is the most loveable of all spaghetti westerns. ‘Loveable’ is probably not an appropriate adjective for a subgenre that isolated, decontextualised, re-contextualised and exaggerated select element...

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) is full of shadows, but the murkiest shadow cast is that of race. Famously, its precursor was an improvisation session at the theatre workshop John Cassavetes ran in the mid-1950...

It is tempting to see the title characters in Husbands (1970) as older versions of the trio in John Cassavetes’ breakthrough film, Shadows (1959) – aimless New Yorkers indulging in noisy horseplay, haplessly pi...

Oliver Cromwell was the 17th century leader of the English Parliamentarians who overthrew and beheaded a monarch and instituted a short-lived republic; when he sat to Samuel Cooper for his portrait, he insisted...

Kenji Mizoguchi’s Miss Oyu suffocates in the aura of high art and good taste. Based on a novella by Japan’s most revered 20th century writer, it features opening credits over paintings of clouds; compositions f...

Lewis Carroll’s Alice revolts against the volatile world of Wonderland by literally bringing the whole house of cards down. Not only does she go on a dangerous journey, she also returns to tell the tale. If Ali...

Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story.  It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commercial imperatives (the action film too commercial?!).  But the...