You’ve been miss­ing our pod­casts haven’t you? 

So, just in time for Halloween Canadian Thanksgiving, here’s Samuel Lee’s take on District 9 : 

Samuel Lee : District 9 from SGNW on Vimeo.

Crash is a 2005 American/German drama film co-written, pro­duced, and directed by Paul Haggis.

Crash is about how the char­ac­ters of dif­fer­ent races and social sta­tus in the city of Los Angeles are linked together in a series of events that take place in the movie. The film show­cases each character’s point of view, their back­ground and how the other char­ac­ters in the movie affect their role in society.

Randi Tan exam­ines the dra­matic con­ven­tions of the movie Crash.

Alexander Mackendrick is one of the most dis­tin­guished (if fre­quently over­looked) direc­tors ever to emerge from the British film indus­try. He was one of the finest and least typ­i­cal direc­tors at Ealing Studios. Perhaps best known for the four come­dies, Whiskey Galore! (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955), satire, with The Man in the White Suit (1951), romance, with Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948). He made there, he nonethe­less cre­ated films of a rare black­ness, marked by a pes­simistic — albeit witty — vision of human cru­elty, cor­rupt­ibil­ity, and self-obsession. Watch the Great-Interview-With-Most-Popular-Stars-In-The-Movie-Business-Show-Young-And-Old with Pamela Soh.

Revered by such leg­endary fel­low direc­tors as Ingmar Bergman and Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier is one of the great­est fig­ures in the his­tory of French cin­ema and of world cin­ema in gen­eral. He is per­haps the most neglected of the “Big Five” of clas­sic French cin­ema (the other four being Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel Carne), partly due to the uneven qual­ity of his work. But despite his mis­fires, the cream of his oeu­vre is sim­ply stel­lar and deserves to be men­tioned in the same breath as filmdom’s most breath­tak­ing mas­ter­pieces. Discover the work of Duvivier with Bharat. Julien Duvivier

Vincente Minnelli is remem­bered as one of American cinema’s most dis­tinc­tive and cre­ative visual styl­ists. His lav­ish use of color and, in the 1950s, widescreen, was praised by French crit­ics who deemed him a mas­ter of “mise-en-scèné.” A gen­er­a­tion of younger American film­mak­ers, includ­ing Martin Scorsese (whose 1977 New York, New York star­ring Vincente and Judy Garland’s daugh­ter Liza Minnelli, con­tains many touches in homage to Minnelli) has cited him as an influ­ence. His best-known screen work was done in the musi­cal genre, where he also worked as a stage direc­tor before going to Hollywood. Discover his work with Michael Davies.

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours tril­ogy is a mon­u­men­tal work that blends cin­ema, phi­los­o­phy and music in a seam­less whole. Kieslowski started his career shoot­ing doc­u­men­taries and later became asso­ci­ated with the cin­ema of moral anx­i­ety, which grouped sev­eral Polish direc­tors, includ­ing ‘Andrzej Wajda’, and aimed to depict the con­di­tions of Poles under com­mu­nism. His best known work was the three col­ors series Red, White, and Blue. Red brought him an Academy Award nom­i­na­tion for best direc­tor in 1995, Blue shared the Golden Lion at Venice in 1993, and White earned Kieslowski the best direc­tor prize in Berlin, 1994. Watch the pod­cast by Dhuha Isa about Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austro–Hungarian-born American film direc­tor who moved from the the­atre to Hollywood, direct­ing over 35 fea­ture films in a five-decade career. He rose to promi­nence for styl­ish film noir mys­ter­ies such as Laura and Fallen Angel. In the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a num­ber of high-profile adap­ta­tions of pop­u­lar nov­els and stage works. Several of these pushed the bound­aries of cen­sor­ship by deal­ing with top­ics which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addic­tion (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), and homo­sex­u­al­ity (Advise and Consent, 1962). He was twice nom­i­nated for the Best Director Academy Award. Discover the work and life of Otto Preminger in this pod­cast by Charmaine Ho.