Peering through a crack in a heavy door like a little voyeur or the viewer of Degas’s bathers if Edgar did homoeroticism, Barry Keoghan’s laughably Dickensian (or Roald Dahl-ian)-named Oliver Quick watches from behind as the golden-bodied object of his affection/obsession/envy, Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton, jacks off until completion in an opulent old bathtub, placed … Continue reading
The most shocking part of late French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 giallo The Strangler (L’Étrangleur), newly restored and given its first ever US theatrical release by Altered Innocence, isn’t baby-faced serial killer Émile (Jacques Perrin) pulling an endearingly quaint homemade-looking white knit scarf around the necks of lonely-hearted Parisian women and yanking. It’s his faithful … Continue reading
“Are you Elvis? Are you God?” So asks PJ Harvey on her astonishing new album I Inside the Old Year Dying. The song, titled “Lwonesome Tonight” in reference to Presley’s own “Are you Lonesome Tonight?”, sees Harvey sing from the perspective of the album’s protagonist, a “not-girl” named Ira-Abel, as she calls out to the … Continue reading
I am the KING! Slicing through a grotesque staccato sludge of clashing drums, atonal piercing guitars, and obscene throbbing bass, that’s the howl that kicked off one of the most berserk televised performances, at least that I’ve ever witnessed. Clashing against a Bauhaus (the design not the band)-inspired stage set for more respectable New Wave … Continue reading
“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” This one of innumerable aphorisms from Nietzsche 2.0 philosopher Emil Cioran is quoted in the opening scene of Rotting in the Sun Continue reading
Piaffe, Ann Oren’s lusty ASMR-laden debut feature in 16mm, pivots around a timid young woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) having to play substitute Foley artist to Zara (Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau), her troubled sibling holed up in a psych ward. Their shared apartment is a ready-to-go sound studio, where pairs of brogues and boots are purposefully … Continue reading
Emily Colucci, Filthy Dreams. That’s how I signed the guestbook for Carrie Schneider’s exhibition I don’t know her at CHART. I don’t usually bother to write in exhibition guestbooks. The only major exception is the book for Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition in which a placard assured us fanatics that he would receive it. … Continue reading
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future presents us with a decaying modern civilization seamlessly coinciding with the moldy wear and tear of contemporary Athens — a fitting shooting location for a sci-fi dystopia that forgoes the polished surfaces, spacefaring, and multiverse traversal that other sci-fi dystopias depict. This version of the future offers up a … Continue reading
Are you sick to death of sleek cinema? An overbearing aesthetic that has trickled down so far that even the most whacko experimental films and unhinged underground movies strive to achieve a similar spotless surface perfection as those boring big-budget Hollywood films? Blech! Give me the awkward, the uncanny, the janky, the shonky, the half-baked, … Continue reading
An ill-fated trip to America’s heart of darkness–Florida–that becomes a whirlwind of sex work and crime. A doomed friendship forged over stripping and text messages. A montage of the most repulsive dicks you can imagine. It’s no question that Zola, the cinematic adaptation of A’Ziah “Zola” King’s jaw-dropping and riveting 148-tweet Twitter magnum opus directed by … Continue reading