A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. L’âge d’or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic “every film buff alive knows this […]
A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven’t seen Mulholland Dr., know that I give it a perfect 5/5, and if I were making a list of the […]
To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the “ye gods, it’s too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?” angle, except that glosses over […]
Take my hand – or whatever other body part you prefer – and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-’50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as […]
Sometimes, I have to wonder which is actually more puritanical: when American movies depicting sex do it from a winking, peekaboo remove of carefully neutered inoffensiveness, or when European – by which I almost exclusively mean French – movies depicting sex in all its explicit, damp glory suggest that the only people having sex are […]
And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film’s project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/17 & 10/19World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival Movies about ideas are wonderful things; movies that are “About Ideas” to the point where they start to disappear inside their own ass are much less so. And the French-made Iranian film Red Rose (that is, the crew and […]
When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket; but all was not lost. He’d been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and […]
Some titles are just destined to be used ironically, and Paradise: Love is their king. Particularly being from Austria, a country with a fetish for cinematic misery. And particularly, I understand, from the mind of director Ulrich Seidl, who I gather (I have not previously seen his work) is kind of like a version of […]
Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies The phrase that I have chosen, “Masters of Italian horror”, doesn’t entirely describe the work of Riccardo Freda, surely not a name spoken of in the same breath as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. But his historical importance is such that he’s […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12World premiere: 23 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival The Palme d’Or winner for 2013, Blue Is the Warmest Color, comes with some serious baggage attached. More than most Palme d’Or winners, I mean. First, the running time: it’s a “lifespan of a romantic relationship” drama that is great at three hours, […]
It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and […]
