QUALITY ON SCREEN

Rear Window (1954) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

November 4th, 2025

1950s American cinema saw the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, change the landscape of the thriller genre. In doing so, Hitchcock pioneered his own technical and storytelling style through his literary film grammar. A prime example of Hitchcock utilising his film language is in his voyeuristic thriller, Rear Window (1954). Rear Window - a film inspired by a short detective story of the same name (originally entitled “It had to be Murder”, which was written by Cornell Woolrich and published in 1942 by Dime Detective Magazine, a pulp fiction magazine that began in 1921 to serve as a source of entertainment during the Great Depression) - is a key film within the cinema art form, teaching us about the American cinema itself. The film is a commentary on cinema, as it plays with cinematic forms through visual language and cinematographic techniques. The literary camera movement, intricate narrative, atmospheric lighting, mise-en-scène, and scoring simultaneously work together to examine psychological despair, the human condition, morality, and class. Each filmic element is utilised competently to involve the audience in the “rear window ethics” within the apartment complex where the protagonist, L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (played by James Stewart), lives. Thus, as with any Hitchcock film, the themes are not only fundamental but also placed at the epicentre of his work, and in the case of Rear Window, the theme of voyeurism is prominently put into question.

Nope (2022) Dir. Jordan Peele

June 30th, 2025

Jordan Peele's storytelling and filmmaking style, as well as his personal vision, consist of not only bending traditional and established genres but also reinventing them. From reinventing the social thriller to using horror as a sub-genre, and most recently, taking on science fiction head-on, it is clear that Peele's work should not be taken at face value. In fact, the way in which his films can and should be understood is through genre subversion, symbolism, foreshadowing, layered dialogue, themes, allegory, as well as his stylised use of cinematography and mise en scène, which ultimately relate to a social, political, economic, or industrial commentary. Peele's third collaboration with Universal Pictures, Nope (2022), was met with shattered expectations from casual moviegoers and critics, as a result of what they thought they were going to witness on screen. Maybe the disappointment materialised because the story and themes did not "live up to" Peele's directorial debut film, Get Out (2017). Maybe the film’s pace did not align with the attention span belonging to the masses of audiences anticipating surface-level spectacle for 130 minutes, or it could be that audiences found the marketing deceiving. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally because Peele set out to subvert the expectations of audiences lining up to see what is behind the curtain of his latest trick.