Films such as 'The Adjuster', 'Calendar' and 'Speaking Parts' established Canadian Armenian director Atom Egoyan as a leading contender for being the worlds most alluring post-modern filmmaker. In these and other films the distortions and perversions of the self are mirrored through an omnipresent (and sexualised) visual media culture. Through the filter of a compassionate detachment his work is an unparalleled probing of identity and alienation, sexuality and dysfunction, psychology and subjectivity. Critic Jonathan Romney traces Egoyan's career, film by film - from his early shorts, through the video-themed features that made his name, to his emergence as prize-winning A list auteur with 'The Sweet Hereafter' and the wider canvasses of his most recent films 'Felicia's Journey' and 'Ararat'. The author shows how films such as Egoyan's 'Exotica' (set in a strip club and structured like a striptease) offer their viewers rich, almost inexhaustibly complex pleasures and demonstrate the craft of one of contemporary cinema's most provocative auteurs.
