Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

  • Home
  • The Magazine
    • About
    • Contributors
    • Categories >
      • Art
      • Artist
      • Books
      • Thought
      • Film
      • Cinema Disordinaire
      • Riot Sounds
      • Records
      • Jazz
      • Interview
      • Inside The Image
      • More   >
        • Architecture
        • Image
        • The Line
        • The New Word
        • That Evening Sun
        • Twenty Que
        • The Natural World
        • Opera
        • Video
        • Fiction
        • From The Shelf
        • FR/BLCK/PR
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Art
    • Art Reviews
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
  • film
    • Film Reviews
  • Records
    • Jazz Reviews
    • All Reviews
  • Riot Sounds
  • Cinema Disordinaire
    • Riot Cinema

.

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

♦♦♦


Thelma

November 9, 2017 By Cvon 1 Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Cinema can become a tool for the exorcising of demons. Repressions and life experiences can suddenly be evoked and shared with everyone in the theater or watching at home. Joachim Trie’s dark and perceptive film, Thelma (2017), is a gothic parable which serves as an interesting examination of the consequences of repression. A young girl becomes the receptor of her parents’ rigid, one could say Puritan, religious views of the world. Released in only a few arthouse venues and now available for streaming via Amazon, Thelma touches upon issues rarely gazed upon by mainstream/fantasy cinema. In an increasingly secular- albeit not rational- world, organized religion is being relegated more to a habit of the past. It even seems the Pope now claims hell does not exist. But for those raised within islands of dogma, belief is a very powerful and palpable part of life. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Florida Project

October 6, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Writer/director Sean Baker does not make flashy films, but slowly unfolding, naturalistic narratives that’s revelations bloom for hours and days after you’ve first seen them. In 2015, he had critics raving over Tangerine, his heartwarming and at times hilarious breakout about a pair of trans sex workers. For his follow-up, Baker awes with his frank yet beautiful portrait of poverty-stricken Americans living in the shadow of The Happiest Place On Earth. 

Set down the highway from Orlando’s Disney World, The Florida Project (2017) focuses on the people scraping by at a rundown motel called The Magic Castle.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Blue My Mind

October 4, 2017 By Cvon 1 Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Becoming a woman can be a traumatizing experience. Your body transforms. It bleeds. Your hormones swing wildly, subjecting you to fits of rage, sadness, lust, and self-doubt. You may look in the mirror and see someone you don’t recognize. You might rebel against this lack of control by acting out with booze, sex, and drugs. In these regards, the 15-year-old heroine of Blue My Mind (2017) is pretty common. But where this Fantastic Fest entry takes a dramatic and sensationally strange turn is that she is not becoming a woman. She’s becoming a mermaid. Far from a fantastical and glamorous experience, it’s one swimming in trauma and body horror. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Get Out

October 3, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by J. Hoberman

Conceived in the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, four days after Donald Trump assumed power, the comedian Jordan Peele’s semi-parodic horror film Get Out (2017) has a complexity worthy of its historical moment.

Get Out opens with a familiar horror-movie trope. Someone walking alone down a dark street stalked by a mysterious force. That the setting is an idyllic suburb, the someone is a young, increasingly panicked black man, and the predator is driving a white car gives the scenario an unmistakable reality. “The scene grows discordantly disturbing because you may, as I did, flash on Trayvon Martin,” wrote Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. That the black youth is not shot but rather abducted is a dreamlike condensation of the movie to come. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Hagazussa

September 22, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Dalton

[from old High-German, a Hagazussa refers to the fence sitter, or one who lives between two worlds]

Anyone who found the deranged cannibalistic excesses of Darren Arofonsky’s mother! a little too vanilla should feast their senses on the deliciously dark flavors of Hagazussa (2017). An atmospheric folk-horror fable that combines a constant undertow of creeping dread with a striking avant-gothic visual style, it marks the feature debut of Vienna-born, Berlin-based director Lukas Feigelfeld. The title draws on an ancient term used to describe witches and female demons across German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Twin Peaks: Episode 8

June 27, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Twin Peaks: Episode 3

May 30, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Episode 3
by Christopher Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Bad Batch

May 28, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Raw

May 28, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

While most of the republic’s cinema-goers flock to local theaters to indulge in the new incarnation of Stephen King’s It, your local RedBox is harboring a deliciously wicked and original work of cinematic viscera, Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016). This cannibal parable created quite the stir at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where audience members were reported to have fainted due to the movie’s bloody moments. As with most movies of this type, the gore doesn’t do justice to the hype. The film’s power resides in what it has to say as opposed to what it wants to show. Like all good satire, it knows that showing too much ruins the effect. Like American Psycho, Raw gets under your skin by casting a mirror. Ducournau is essentially putting on display a civilization eating itself, like Goya’s painting “Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son).” Raw is art as splatter, capturing in its own special way those moments when youth, sexual awakening and finding one’s place in the social labyrinth all crash together. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

 I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

February 20, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Joe Lipsett 

I’m still disappointed that I missed out on Osgood Perkins’ directorial debut February (now retitled The Blackcoat’s Daughter) at last year’s TIFF.  Bloody Disgusting raved about the Emma Roberts film, naming it one of the best films of the year. So I knew that this year I had to check out Perkins’ sophomore effort, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016).

The new film is a slow-burn haunted house story that’s a little reminiscent of The Others. Unlike other recent ghost films, Perkins eschews CGI completely, opting to use lingering off-centered static shots, silence and an unsettling soundtrack to create a moody, atmospheric tone. To suggest that the film is languid is an understatement. Perkins is less interested in a conventional narrative than he is in enveloping the audience in the timeless world filled with mystery novels, endless routine and constant ethereal banging on the walls. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Eyes of My Mother

January 15, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Nicolas Pesce’s new American gothic, The Eyes Of My Mother (2016), is a spare, simmering vision of riptiding loneliness and grim pathology, and it is both beautiful and unconventionally good. Pesce gives us a protagonist we cannot know, nor scarcely bear, and delivers a film we can no less turn our eyes from, though considering the subject at hand this may be blindingly ill-advised. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Wailing

December 20, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

The Wailing is an expansive and often excruciating horror film from South Korea. It is the work of the director Na Hong-jin, whose 2009 debut feature, the action thriller The Chaser, made a huge impression not least for its almost staggering flouting of genre convention. The Wailing (2016), about demonic possession, is similarly uncompromising. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Lure

December 15, 2016 By Cvon 1 Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

As folkloric Polish musical sex-comedy horror movies go, The Lure (2015) is pretty interesting. The first feature directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska, the film follows two mermaid sisters onto land, where they look for love, feast on human flesh and find work singing and stripping at a nightclub that might have come from an early David Lynch movie or a vintage-’80s music video [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Mad Max: Fury Road

December 11, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Anthony Lane

There is a moment, in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), when Max (Tom Hardy) washes blood off his face. This is unsurprising, since he has just engaged in one of many fights, but two points are worthy of note. First, the blood is not his. Second, he washes it off not with water but with mother’s milk, siphoned from a gas tanker. And there, in one image, you have George Miller’s film—wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Bone Tomahawk

December 10, 2016 By Cvon 1 Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis 

In Bone Tomahawk (2015), an old-timer, an invalid and a gunslinger set out across the blistering desert to rescue three innocents from a band of savage cannibals. Their mission seems beyond futile, but don’t count them out too soon: Their leader is Kurt Russell.

Yet Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count. As a result, he has given us a horror movie whose monsters are withheld until the tail end of its 132 minutes, and an action movie whose longest section involves mostly walking and talking. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Baskin

December 8, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jamie Righetti

One of the great pleasures of international horror films is uncovering what is considered scary in other countries. Even a quick glance at some of the most memorable titles of recent years highlights how diverse these offerings can be: Sweden’s sublime vampire tale Let The Right One In; South Korea’s psychological chiller A Tale of Two Sisters; France’s visceral Martyrs; and Serbia’s controversial A Serbian Film. But if we dig a little deeper, we find the same threads woven into the entire horror landscape. We fear the unknown, the dark, the grotesque, but most of all we fear pain and death. Our fears are primal and universal; horror regularly serves as the great unifier in a way most genres can’t match.

It should come as no surprise then, that much of what we see in Baskin (2015), the first feature length offering from Turkish director Can Evrenol, feels familiar.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

December 7, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis

Playing out in gloomy interiors and frigid exteriors, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) is a stealth weapon. Slow and seductive and deliberately vague, this deeply unsettling tale of lost parents and troubled daughters exudes atmosphere while hoarding facts. Yet the movie is so perfectly acted and gorgeously filmed (the cinematographer is Julie Kirkwood) that we don’t mind its coyness; the twanging notes of trepidation make us almost grateful for the leisurely build. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Witch

December 7, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Anthony Lane

A father and his son, a boy of twelve or so, go into a wood. They are out hunting, armed with a gun. As they walk, they engage in one of those ordinary, man-to-man chats that arise on a country stroll. “Canst thou tell me what thy corrupt nature is?” the father asks. “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually,” the lad replies. Clearly, he has learned the words by rote, yet they don’t sound tired or hollow in his mouth; he means them. His next task is to help with the traps that have been laid in the undergrowth. We watch his small hands slowly easing wide the iron jaws. These scenes are from The Witch (2015), a film written and directed by Robert Eggers.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Embrace of the Serpent

December 6, 2016 By Cvon 1 Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

“The horror! The horror!” The terminal valediction of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is deconstructed with a raging eloquence in the Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s majestic, spellbinding film, Embrace of the Serpent (2105). Is the unspeakable savagery evoked by his dying words really beyond the reach of the civilized imagination? I doubt it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The Tribe

December 5, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Ben Sachs

The Tribe (2014) is a brilliant formal achievement that marks Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky as a filmmaker to watch. It takes place at a boarding school for deaf children, with all the roles played by deaf performers; the dialogue is entirely in Ukrainian sign language, and there are no subtitles or narration to translate the conversations for hearing viewers. (Even those schooled in American Sign Language will be baffled.) Slaboshpitsky uses ingenious strategies to draw the audience into the characters’ world while respecting fundamental differences between the deaf and the hearing. The film, his feature debut, is never less than tantalizing, bringing us close enough to the subjects to inspire fascination but not close enough to establish thorough understanding. For hearing viewers, Slaboshpitsky approximates the experience of being deaf, and in that regard the film is a valuable provocation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Next Page »
RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.