Skip to Content

Limping, Lisping and Lobstering: Escaping Yorgos Lanthimos’ Hotel of Purity

Back when Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos first clambered barefaced upon the international stage with his daring Dogtooth, quite a few hastened to mention its striking resemblance to Arturo Ripstein’s similarly self-contained The Castle of Purity, made some 35 years earlier. In the wake of his first English-language effort The Lobster, one might even go further and compare all that Lanthimos has done thus far to Ripstein’s film: the …

Read More about Limping, Lisping and Lobstering: Escaping Yorgos Lanthimos’ Hotel of Purity

New Projects: Help fund ‘Helen Keller vs. Nightwolves’

Before Cards Against Humanity, we played Apples to Apples, and if you wanted to make that game any fun at all for someone over 10, you had to have an inside joke wild card. And of course the only good wild card that could win every time no matter what was Helen Keller. Her name …

Read More about New Projects: Help fund ‘Helen Keller vs. Nightwolves’

Disappointing ‘Welcome to New York’ feels like conquered ground for Ferrara

There are times during Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York when you can feel a defiant filmmaker pushing back against the moralizing status quo. When he gives voice to trampled idealism and unapologetic carnality. Those fleeting moments of clarity make the rest of this disjointed, unfocused mess all the more painful. Cinema owes a debt of gratitude to auteurs like Ferrara and Gérard Depardieu, but there’s simply no dramatic necessity for this film to exist.

Read More about Disappointing ‘Welcome to New York’ feels like conquered ground for Ferrara

NYFF 2014: Artistic Differences – ‘Pasolini’

The art and the artist are undoubtedly strange bedfellows, and while there is a vast ocean to explore in terms of this relationship, the tempestuousness rarely ever seems to get its time on screen. This is no different for Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini – a biopic about the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini – where several times the idea is talked about, even spoken about with the same kind of verve that one would use to discuss the lurid sexual details that are illustrated on-screen, but that push and pull is not actually articulated on-screen. Pasolini was certainly a complex man, a Jack-of-all-trades in the art world, and Ferrara does an excellent job talking about this – his role in politics, his poetry, his novels, and, of course, his films – but the director spends little time showing us that influence. The biopic of an artist, I believe, begs the question of that relationship and that influence. “It’s either I kill myself or I do it,” he says about making movies. Though the film is certainly honorific, it’s not completely explorative.

Read More about NYFF 2014: Artistic Differences – ‘Pasolini’

‘Pasolini’ Movie Review – is overambitious but nonetheless compelling

With the release of two films in 2014, Abel Ferrara has had one of the biggest years in his long and rich career. Welcome to New York, which premiered at the Cannes film festival, was a confrontational splash that divided audiences and critics alike. As the Toronto International Film Festival was underway, the film jumped back into the headlines too, as Ferrara began a media fight over the negotiation of an R-rated cut of the film, which he refused to endorse. This revelation came at a particularly apt moment, as Toronto presented Ferrara’s second film of the year, Pasolini. It seemed only appropriate that, while waging a public battle over censorship, Ferrara’s new film about a man rumoured to have died because of his art would be premiering.

Read More about ‘Pasolini’ Movie Review – is overambitious but nonetheless compelling

Fantasia 2014: ‘Welcome to New York’ and the war of pleasure

Welcome to New York Directed by Abel Ferrara Written by Abel Ferrara and Chris Zois USA, 2014 Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of …

Read More about Fantasia 2014: ‘Welcome to New York’ and the war of pleasure

Without Theatres: ‘Fear City’ is the murky answer to ‘Taxi Driver’

New York City holds a large cinematic history of being a hotspot for noirish sleaze, a stage for a morally ambiguous society held together by a justice system without empathy or remorse. The playground was manifested in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as a window to the subversive end to the American Dream, a place underneath the hopeful symbols of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The apocalyptic mood of Scorsese’s revelation was transplanted into the works of Abel Ferrara, a Bronx-born local whose early focus on the deep evils of his immediate landscape labeled him a mainstay in exploitative film. After The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms. 45 (1981), Ferrara continued his narrative strength of depicting the consequences of homicidal justice-seekers with Fear City, regarded as a relative failure due to its mainstream compromises without mainstream appeal. Nonetheless, Ferrara’s transitional work still manages to translate, from a mind of schlock-aesthete, an answer to Taxi Driver as well as a foundation to Ferrara’s more self-serious works.

Read More about Without Theatres: ‘Fear City’ is the murky answer to ‘Taxi Driver’

Greatest Sci-fi Horror Films

The concept of the sci-fi horror genre allows us to address the built-in terrors and tensions developed in society that are difficult, if not impossible, to actualize and confront directly. It has the strengths of sci-fi’s ability to question our potential as a developed species, breaking current conceptions of reality to attain a scenario that …

Read More about Greatest Sci-fi Horror Films

Unsung Gems – ‘King of New York’ a slick and stylish great

King of New York Directed by Abel Ferrara Written by Nicholas St. John US, 1990 Something of a cult hero among worshippers of ‘video-nasty’ exploitation flicks and latter day grim and grungy crime flicks, it’s a surprise to learn that Bronx director Abel Ferrara is still working diligently behind the camera, albeit on the kind …

Read More about Unsung Gems – ‘King of New York’ a slick and stylish great

NYFF2011: Day 4 – Abel Ferrara’s ‘4:44 Last Day on Earth’

4:44 Last Day on Earth Directed by Abel Ferrara Written by Abel Ferrara 2011, USA Following the trend of doomsday as with Melancholia, Abel Ferrara brings his own take on the genre with 4:44 Last Day on Earth. Willem Dafoe stars as Cisco, a New York City actor who lives with his younger lover Skye …

Read More about NYFF2011: Day 4 – Abel Ferrara’s ‘4:44 Last Day on Earth’