Dangerous Game (1993)

With Dangerous Game (1993), Abel Ferrara makes a movie about making movies, so you’re gonna get histrionic method acting shouting, people wearing sunglasses indoors smoking cigarettes like vampires, catholic themes about indulging vices and expunging guilt, and copious scenes of drinking and drug-taking while a Schoolly D track pumps away in the background. For Dangerous […]

Special Effects (1984)

What I enjoy about Larry Cohen is how he approaches things as a writer: the story’s gotta have a hook! Released in the same year as Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Cohen’s film Special Effects (1984) is a comparable twist on a Hitchcockian thriller. The hook: What if a movie director was a murderer? (A […]

Merry-Go-Round (1981)

“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he […]

Seventh Code (2013)

Seventh Code (2013): file under the category of “good one-hour movies.” Shot and filmed in Russia, a young Japanese woman named Akiko (Atsuko Maeda, pop singer and former member of girl group AKB48) races into frame, dragging a suitcase behind her. She is in pursuit of a Japanese man in a suit, Matsunaga (Ryohei Suzuki) […]

On The Beach At Night Alone (2017)

A beach is always a contemplative site in cinema, and South Korean director Hong Sang-soo seems to return to it as a space for his characters. On The Beach At Night Alone (2017) features two beaches – one in Hamburg, the other in South Korea – and neither takes place in the pitch-black of night […]