Author Darragh O’Donoghue

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...