Riot Material

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Cinema Disordinaire is a unique selection of strange and wonderful films, along with their original reviews, which showcase the singular in all of cinema -- seminal and often entirely sublime films that have arrived on screen this past half century. For fans of off-kilter and/or confounding cinema, there's not much here you won't thoroughly enjoy.

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Please Baby Please

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manuel Betancourt

The opening moments of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please (2022) play like an archly stylized West Side Story by way of Kenneth Anger. Only, instead of the Jets, we have the “Young Gents,” a group of leather-clad rascals who dance their way through the streets of a neon-tinged, foggy 1950s Manhattan before descending on an unsuspecting couple and, well, beating them to death. Looking like Marlon Brando circa The Wild One cosplayers, this ragtag group is interrupted by two stunned bystanders, Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough). The moment will change the bohemian couple forever. The lustful gazes exchanged between Arthur and Teddy (the always delectable Karl Glusman, here in full leather boy cruising mode), as well as the electrifying fear-turned-titillation Suze experiences (Arthur may want, but Suze wants to be Teddy), set them both on a conquest to undo the relationship they thought they wanted. In the process, Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar. [Read more…]

Jethica

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis

Jethica (2022), a brazenly odd yet gently appealing horror-comedy, is difficult to describe without spoiling its swerving tone or smartly spaced reveals. Working with pandemic-influenced themes of loss and trauma and isolation, the director Pete Ohs (who collaborated on the script with his small cast) delivers an off-kilter take on the kind of haunting that all too many women have experienced. [Read more…]

Pearl

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Reviewed by William Bibbiani

Ti West’s Pearl (2022) is an oddity amongst horror sequels and prequels. The fact of its existence is not the remarkable part. What’s actually extraordinary is that Pearl is more than just a fantastic prequel: it successfully illuminates and recontextualizes its predecessor, dramatically improving a film that was already acclaimed to begin with. Pearl is a prequel to West’s retro slasher X, which takes place in the 1970s and follows a group of independent filmmakers who rent a cabin on a farm from an elderly couple. Their mission is clandestine, to secretly film a pornographic movie starring Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, Emma) under the farmers’ noses. But when they’re not having spirited debates about sex-positivity, they’re getting murdered one-by-one by Pearl (also played by Goth), an old woman who longs for her sexual prime. [Read more…]

Crimes of the Future

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller

A line from Crimes of the Future (2022), David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have to be a new sex?” “Yes,” he is told by Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, with the assurance of a fashion influencer, “It’s time.”

It’s time for a new sex? For Timlin, infatuated with Saul, this might mean, “It’s time for a new sex act—sex between us.” For devotees of Cronenberg’s cinema, the phrase more pertinently means, “It’s time for a new Cronenberg film.” The director has been spawning new versions of sex since the start of his career. Murder is the new sex (Videodrome, 1983), car accidents are the new sex (Crash, 1996), commodity fetishism is the new sex (Cosmopolis, 2012), and so on. To get in the mood for new sex, you might resort to the rave drug that Cosmopolis calls “novo,” and afterward, you may need to be cured of bugs at the “Institute of Neo-venereal Disease” (the first Crimes of the Future, 1970). At all events, the precondition for making it with anyone in Cronenberg is making it new. [Read more…]

Mad God

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Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin

Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. Not to disparage either of those staples of cinema, but neither Tyrannosaurs nor Tatooine have anything on Tippett.

The aptly titled Mad God (2021) can only be pointing to such a mind as endlessly imaginative as Tippett’s, whose film can only be described as a playground of the damned and demented, where imagery of war, nuclear fallout, slave labour, torture, espionage, Orwellian dystopia and Cronenberg-esque body horror seemingly compete and collaborate with one another to find out what exactly will wind up pushing the world into the inevitable oblivion it seems to be hurtling towards.

[Read more…]

Dune

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

By Manohla Dargis

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’s brainpan. But this is Dune (2021), baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify. [Read more…]

Titane

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Reviewed by A.O. Scott

Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby — her compulsion, her kink, her vocation — is murder. As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before.

Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum. [Read more…]

The Innocents

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Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis

The Innocents (2021) may share a title — and even some thematic fragments — with Jack Clayton’s 1961 ghost story, but its vibe is ultimately more superheroic than spectral. There’s no hint of either characteristic, though, in the movie’s gorgeous opening shot of an angelically sleeping child, the brush of eyelashes on freckled skin glowing in summer sunlight. The child is 9-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), and when she wakes and carefully pinches the thigh of her autistic, nonverbal sister, Anna (played by the neurotypical actor Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), we know Ida is no angel. [Read more…]

Pig

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Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis

Shielded by a rat’s-nest beard and layers of decaying clothing, Rob (Nicolas Cage) lives in a rudimentary cabin in the Oregon wilderness with his beloved pig. Together, they forage for truffles that Rob barters for necessities when Amir (an indispensable Alex Wolff) makes his weekly visit. The truffles are bound for high-end Portland restaurants; when the pig is stolen, her owner will be compelled to follow the fungi.

Pig (2021), Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition. Told in three chapters and a string of beautifully delineated scenes, the movie flirts with several genres — revenge drama, culinary satire — while committing to none. Instead, Sarnoski takes us on an enigmatic journey as Rob searches for his pet and revisits a life he long-ago abandoned. [Read more…]

Come True

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Reviewed By Ben Kenigsberg

On Come True (2020), the Canadian filmmaker Anthony Scott Burns is billed as the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and lead member of the visual-effects team. Under the pseudonym Pilotpriest, he also shares credit for the synth-driven, ’80s-style score. He acquits himself well on all counts except maybe scripting (he wrote the story with Daniel Weissenberger). Like Our House (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, Come True is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease. [Read more…]

Possessor

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Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

Possessor (2020), about an assassin who works by taking over the mind and body of someone who can get close to the victim without suspicion, could have sprung from the imagination of David Cronenberg and, like his early films, Possessor is equal parts cerebral and visceral. But this film is the work of the writer-director Brandon Cronenberg, his son. It depicts horrific murders in appalling detail as it relentlessly interrogates the experience of inhabiting a foreign body. [Read more…]

Ham on Rye

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Reviewed by John DeFore

Promotional materials bill Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye (2019) as a “coming-of-age comedy,” comparing it to Dazed and Confused and John Hughes films. That’s as misleading as calling Eraserhead a reluctant-groom rom-com. But what other shorthand would you use for this strange, atmospheric work, which is 100 percent not a comedy but does share a spiritual connection — refracted through art-film aesthetics and anomie — with the aforementioned landmarks? Quiet and carefully made but cryptic, it relies on the viewer to complete its metaphors. To most patient eyes, it will look like a gentle ode to those who seemed part of the crowd in high school, then simply didn’t transform into the kind of adults their peers chose to be. [Read more…]

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Dennis Harvey

Some of the more obscure guilty-pleasure subgenres familiar to fans of international psychotronic cinema get thrown in a blender to create Miguel Llanso’s second feature. The resulting concoction is a witch’s brew of cheap 1960s European 007 knockoffs, ’70s Filipino exploitation cinema, vintage kung fu pics, retro TV sci-fi cheese and lucha libre-type masked machismo, as well as myriad other elements, filtered through a narrative framework of Cold War anxiety and Afrofuturist techno-fantasy.

Billed as “a WTF thriller,” it will duly produce that flummoxed exclamation from unprepared viewers. But those with a simpatico arcane pop-cultural taste for giddy absurdism will find Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019) as delightfully nonsensical as its inspired title. [Read more…]

Nina Wu

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Beatrice Loayza

It’s easy enough to slap the #MeToo label on Nina Wu (2019) and call it a day. Yes, its titular heroine (a remarkable Wu Ke-Xi, also a co-writer) is an actress brutalized and exploited by a misogynist film industry, and the Taiwanese director, Midi Z, never pulls his punches. Yet this startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism. [Read more…]

Bacurau

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Reviewed by Manohla Dargis

The town in the shocker Bacurau (2019) is fictional, a bit magical, at once ordinary and otherworldly. It’s filled with faces that have life etched in them, which helps deepen the realism. And while the story is set in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, laughing children, crowing roosters, the grinning balladeer with a guitar. Then, the guns come out, history rushes in and a ghost pops by. (It smiles.) [Read more…]

The Lodge

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is back with their much-anticipated English-language debut, The Lodge (2019). And while this psychological thriller has plenty in common with their first film, the vibe is decidedly different. [Read more…]

Parasite

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By now, when you walk into a Joon-ho movie, you should expect something wildly riveting and wickedly clever. And that’s about all you can predict, because Joon-ho’s stories take audiences down paths twisted and devastating, often just when you think everything might just work out. In this vein, his pitch-black comedy Parasite (2019) might his masterpiece. [Read more…]

The Lighthouse

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse (2019). [Read more…]

The Vast of Night

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone lines, a light in the skies. In The Vast of Night (2019), this mystery will be cracked wide open by an unlikely pair of amateur detectives. The result is an ode to The Twilight Zone series that is fittingly riveting, exhilaratingly daring, and a whiz-bang technical marvel. [Read more…]

The Long Walk

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Brad Sanders 

Lao horror director Mattie Do makes films where the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is permeable, but the people who pass through it often pay unimaginable costs for the privilege. In her debut feature Chanthaly, the title character can communicate with her dead mother, but only when she forgoes the heart medication that keeps her alive. Do’s second film, Dearest Sister, features a young woman who begins to see the spirits of people who are about to die, but only after she develops a degenerative eye disease. Engaging with the ghosts turns her into a vessel for winning lottery numbers, but it also sends her into debilitating seizures. The Long Walk (2019), Do’s third collaboration with her screenwriter husband Christopher Larsen, gives its lead spirit medium the most complicated risk-reward analysis of all. Taken as a loose trilogy, the films do nothing less than invent a Lao national horror cinema. [Read more…]