Revisit: Bad Lieutenant Ferrara realizes that for the religion to work, somebody has to be damned. Read More
Tommaso An anomaly in Ferrara’s filmmaking in that its character is not the embodiment of his milieu but an outsider struggling to fit into a different place. Read More
Rediscover: The Addiction Epitomizes Ferrara’s ability to wring exceptional formal rigor out of shoestring budgets and a style that remains fundamentally gritty and street-level. Read More
Ms. 45 [xrr rating=4.0/5]Thana (Zoë Lund, then known as Zoë Tamerlis) works as a seamstress in Midtown Manhattan’s Garment District. Pretty, mousy, and mute, she declines an invitation to hang out with her female coworkers. She pays a high cost for shunning the sisterhood. Drafthouse Films has distributed wildly different and essential cinema in the past few years, from the rediscovered Taekwondo-Ninja … Read More
Re-Make/Re-Model: Bad Lieutenant (1992) vs. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) Remakes have been around nearly as long as Hollywood itself, and not always for the reasons or with the results you’d think. Spectrum Culture’s new feature Re-Make/Re-Model will examine the long history of cinematic remakes, the good movies turned great, the bad ideas turned worse and the weird ones turned boring. Of all movies to remake, Bad Lieutenant has to … Read More
Re-Make/Re-Model: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) vs. Body Snatchers (1993) Remakes have been around nearly as long as Hollywood itself, and not always for the reasons or with the results you’d think. Spectrum Culture’s new feature Re-Make/Re-Model will examine the long history of cinematic remakes, the good movies turned great, the bad ideas turned worse and the weird ones turned boring. Don Siegel’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers … Read More
4:44 Last Day on Earth [xrr rating=4.25/5]One of last year’s major films was Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which depicted the end of life on Earth. This year, Abel Ferrara’s apocalyptic drama 4:44 Last Day on Earth deserves, but probably won’t get, similar attention. Despite some similarities, including most curiously ending on a fade to white, these are two rather different films. They have perhaps little … Read More
Chelsea on the Rocks Chelsea on the Rocks Dir: Abel Ferrara Rating 3.5/5.0 Aliquot Films 88 Minutes It’s fitting that Abel Ferrara, the man behind edgy tales about New York’s underbelly (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York) and a notoriously unreliable and undisciplined director, would salute the history of Manhattan’s legendary bohemian abode of debauchery. The free-form, erratic and absorbing Chelsea on the Rocks … Read More
