“For its young (and vast) audiences, Shrek actually shouldered the same role of moral guidance which it satirized in fairytales—and perhaps the heavy dose of world-bitten irony in the storytelling leaked into its message of self-acceptance.”

“Contemporary viewers may find themselves identifying a little too closely with downtrodden protagonist Sam Lowry, seeking his escape from the surveillance capitalist hellscape in an audio-visual dreamland of yesteryear.”

“The gaunt, puppy-eyed protagonist of Nightcrawler (2014) is no more than a content purveyor of TV news, a regular guy descending to ever ghastlier depths, not at the behest of conventional incentives such as love, revenge, or fear, but of modern hustle culture. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom works as a ’stringer’, or freelance cameraman, hunting down the grisliest crime scenes in LA to shoot, sell, and even, perhaps, stage.”

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail teased out a persistent sense of homegrown, wilful eccentricity from its parodic portrayal of British lives ancient and modern, a sense which seems to have grown only more potent in intervening decades.”

“The film’s ambiguous examination of the woman as victim- as the physical prey of men, and as a prisoner of her social and narrative context- demonstrates how Kurosawa’s psychological elements continue to resurface in unexpectedly familiar ways.”