If there is a universal defining characteristic to modern living, it is anxiety in instability. As horizons to attaining prosperity or generational advancement have receded, all the majority of us have done for the last 50 years is turn ourselves into ever more efficient consumers of television.

Rendering us housebound individuals who desire nothing beyond Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, and PornHub for sustenance. Sharing no genuine sense of lived experience that might help build communities; an all-encompassing cultural sphere, functioning as…

Exploring a conflict between sceptical self-image and repressed emotional self, battling the rigid subordination of the modern to the traditional. Beginning in the most literal fashion with our princess as a lost damsel; all the lowborn townsfolk too spellbound by her presence to offer any assistance. As she descends alone into the labyrinth, in a quest to free her children, she begins to learn the preconditions behind her own perception, and subsequently outwit them.

While she was one of the…

From Ingrid Bergman through to Julia Roberts, admiring close up shots of beautiful women smiling broadly as they fight back the tears, has long been a favoured weapon in the director's toolkit, whenever the time comes to emotionally crush their audience. In all its many adoring studies of Audrey Hepburn's face – literally including a commemorative best of compilation near the conclusion – Roman Holiday makes for one of the best examples of this kind of weaponised star power winning the battle…

Like its filmic cousin James Bond – Danger: Diabolik contains some pretty indefensible gender politics. Even if this particular Italian brand of misogyny has a touch less sleaze and sinister edge about it, when compared to Ian Fleming's preferred way of writing women. Perhaps it helps that Marissa Mell as the main object of the camera's devoted consideration, differs from your average Bond girl, in that she is at least someone our hero is in a committed, loving relationship with.…

Whether suppressed or actualised, that characteristic sense of longing within queer romance is entirely relatable to the escapism offered in the fantasy worlds of art. In our voyeurism we're encouraged to idealise and fetishise the lives existing behind the faces we encounter. We yearn for self-discovery in their company, hoping for a brief moment to forget the entire process is an illusion.

It's a tension Céline Sciamma uses to express the heavy ache of desire for companionship and creative expression;…

One of the more contemptuous cultural products I can ever recall. Posturing as a huggably soft, saccharine morality tale, while presenting a profoundly reactionary idea; fuming with generational resentment at an alien and ugly contemporary world.

With Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis both entering their mid-sixties, you do empathise with the cold chill anyone their age must experience upon encountering the music kids today are into. Beholding nothing but postmodern rejections of sincerity, pornographic lyrics, and the discordant, digitised noise…