Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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Cinema Disordinaire is a uniquely selective entry of films -- listed in order of date upon release and reviews in immediate response -- that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. In other words, there's not much here you won't thoroughly enjoy.

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House of Sand

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

If anything, the title of House of Sand (2005) is an understatement. This lovely film, directed by Andrucha Waddington (Me You Them), takes place in a corner of northern Brazil that is a veritable universe of dry, swirling white dust. Like the main characters — three women of successive generations exiled from a softer, more accommodating life in the city — you grow accustomed to this landscape after a while, and come to appreciate its beauty. But at first it seems about as hospitable as the surface of Mars: gritty, windy, almost actively hostile to human habitation. [Read more…]

Pusher I & II

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Robert Abele

It’s the rare crime film that balances the vicarious thrill of rampant illegality with the real-world desperation of broken souls who are nearly always one wrong move away from a wretched end. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy — showing this weekend at the American Cinematheque over two days — are such movies, character-overlapping slash-and-burners about underworld types who discover the pitfalls of vulnerability in their profession when it’s least advantageous. [Read more…]

Japón

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

After a long, dreamy car trip from the city, a haggard middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis) walks through a field, dotted with cactuses and scrubby trees, on the rocky edge of a canyon. He meets a group of hunters, and asks them the way to an obscure, tiny village at the bottom. Someone asks if he is going to visit family down there. ”No,” he replies, ”I’m going to kill myself.”

The production notes inform me that Japón (2002) the first feature by the young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose opening I have just described, was shot in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, and also in 16-millimeter CinemaScope, a format that captures wide expanses of land and sky, as well as flickering nuances of natural light.  [Read more…]

City Of God

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Christopher Orr

A few minutes into City of God (2002), the narrator offers (in English-subtitled Portuguese) a pointed description of the sprawling slum outside Rio de Janeiro that gives the film its name: “There was no electricity, paved streets, or transportation. But for the rich and powerful our problems didn’t matter.” This introduction could easily have marked the beginning of a filmic diatribe about the plight of the poor in Brazil, an earnest work intended to inform but not entertain. Instead it marks the beginning of a glorious exercise in cinematic style. Yes, City of God tells a story about the hopeless, desperate denizens of a drug- and violence-riddled slum. But tells a story, and does so with a narrative panache that owes more to Scorsese or Tarantino than to any well-meaning documentarian. [Read more…]

Demonlover

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

The enigmatic antiheroine of Olivier Assayas’s diabolical techno thriller, Demonlover (2002), suggests a female cyber-age equivalent of the archetypal Man With No Name. Diane (Connie Nielsen), as she calls herself, is a coolly seductive industrial spy of ambiguous sexuality, with an invented résumé, who sometimes speaks in riddles. During a romantic dinner with Hervé (Charles Berling), her suspicious but lustful boss at a Paris-based multinational conglomerate, she declares: ”No one sees anything, ever. They watch but they don’t understand.” [Read more…]

Sexy Beast

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Reviewed by A. O. Scott

At the start of Sexy Beast (2001), Gal (Ray Winstone), a heavyset, middle-aged English hoodlum, is enjoying a carefree retirement on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Yes, a boulder has tumbled into his swimming pool, smashing the tilework and narrowly missing Gal himself, but this seems more like an inconvenience than an ill omen. Gal spends his time sunbathing on his patio, dining out with his friends, Aitch and Jackie (Cavan Kendall and Julianne White), and dancing in the moonlight with his beloved wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). He’s happy to have left England (”What a toilet!”) and the dodgy life he led there. [Read more…]

Donnie Darko

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by J. Hoberman

Donnie Darko (2001), the first feature by 26-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly, is a wondrous, moodily self-involved piece of work that employs X-Files magic realism to galvanize what might have been a routine tale of suburban teen angst—OK, borderline schizophrenia. Part comic book, part case study, this is certainly the most original and venturesome American indie I’ve seen this year. [Read more…]

Waking Life

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

There are those who will insist that the best way of approaching Waking Life (2001), Richard Linklater’s witty cosmic wow of a movie, is in a chemically altered state, and it’s easy to see why.

The screenplay for Waking Life, which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow at Alice Tully Hall, blithely tosses out a bouquet of theories about human consciousness — some intellectually rigorous, others ludicrous crackpot riffs — whose cumulative impact suggests a stoned-out Big Bang of human thought. [Read more…]

Mulholland Drive

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

While watching Mulholland Drive (2001), you might well wonder if any film maker has taken the cliché of Hollywood as ”the dream factory” more profoundly to heart than David Lynch. The newest film from the creator of Blue Velvet (1986) and Twin Peaks (1990-’91) is a nervy full-scale nightmare of Tinseltown that seizes that concept by the throat and hurls it through the looking glass.

By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive. Its frenzied final 45 minutes, in which the story circles back on itself in a succession of kaleidoscopic Chinese boxes, conveys the maniacal thrill of an imagistic brainstorm. [Read more…]

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999),  Jim Jarmusch tries to do to the samurai epic and the gangster movie what he did to the western in Dead Man (1997), his dreamy, elegiac deconstruction of cowboys-and-Indians mythology. Like a postmodern magpie, Mr. Jarmusch likes to scavenge shiny bits of pop-culture flotsam — mobsters in their sharkskin suits, gaudy cartoon animals, sleek imported luxury cars, iridescent CD’s — and weave them into quirky, ramshackle habitations. [Read more…]

Audition

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Elvis Mitchell

The Japanese psychological horror film Audition (1999) has been responsible for throngs of shaken filmgoers staggering out of theaters for the last year or so; it’s Fatal Attraction with a sense of morality instead of a need to pander — specifically, the movie’s theme is the objectification of women in Japanese society and the mirror-image horror of retribution it could create. [Read more…]

Gummo

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Janet Maslin

October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) as the worst film of the year. No conceivable competition will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine’s debut feature. Turned loose with a camera and the Emperor’s new clothes, the writer of the vastly better Kids creates an aimless vision of Midwestern teen-age anomie, complete with drugs, garbage, dead cats and neat tricks like turning off Granny’s respirator. When it comes to boy wonders exploring the cutting edge of independent cinema, the buck stops cold right here [Read more…]

Kids

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Reviewed by Janet Maslin

The beggar on the New York subway has a body truncated at the waist and he rolls on a cart, chanting “I have no legs!” in a singsong as he passes. Just for a moment, he attracts the notice of Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce), who look young and healthy but are actually much more damaged than this legless man.

As Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) so harrowingly demonstrates, these two are part of a spiritually dead teen-age culture built on aimlessness, casual cruelty and empty pleasure. Mr. Clark’s vision of these characters is so bleak and legitimately shocking that it makes almost any other portrait of American adolescence look like the picture of Dorian Gray.

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Natural Born Killers

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Reviewed by Roger Ebert

Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it hadn’t been for the O.J. Simpson case. Maybe Stone meant his movie as a warning about where we were headed, but because of Simpson it plays as an indictment of the way we are now. We are becoming a society more interested in crime and scandal than in anything else – more than in politics and the arts, certainly, and maybe even more than sports, unless crime is our new national sport. [Read more…]

Liquid Sky

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Janet Maslin

Slava Tsurkerman is a Soviet emigre who has lived in New York City since 1976, apparently long enough for him to get the lay of the land. Mr. Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982), which opens today at the Waverly, presents a vision of the city that is genuinely startling. His film, with a heroine who is sometimes a hero and who is apt to show up in a red corset with matching red-and-blond skunk hairdo, can hardly be for everyone. But the right audiences are bound to appreciate the originality displayed here, not to mention the color, rage, nonchalance, sly humor and ferocious fashion sense.

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Apocalypse Now

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Michael Wood

Apocalypse Now (1979)
directed by Francis Coppola

This spectacular film, long delayed and said to be 17 million dollars over its budget, ends in a welter of bathos that has to be seen to be believed, and that weighs down the whole work with its mournful freight of clutching, unappeasable ambition. But the film holds together well enough until it reaches its final muddle, and it has scenes and moments unequaled in recent European or American movies. Indeed, it has one long sequence so right and so powerful that it actually causes the confusion of the end, since it leaves Coppola with nothing to say. He cannot discover the promised “heart of darkness” in the murk of his conclusion, because he stumbled across it much earlier—earlier in the finished film and in the shooting—on a bright, noisy beach strewn with soldiers and helicopters, sheets of flame lighting up the background, as a plausible imitation of napalm devoured the jungle. He went on looking—writing, directing, editing—for the horror he had already found. [Read more…]

Eraserhead

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

by Howard Hampton

It’s Friday night, a couple days before the end of 1979. A young woman is driving past a movie theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, going nowhere but away. She argued with a boyfriend while trying to watch an X show at Madame Wong’s: Sick of his macho-crybaby shit, she shoved him into some angry skinheads, jumped in her rusty Datsun, and bolted. On KROQ, Frazier Smith’s following “Search and Destroy” with “Baby’s on Fire”… [Read more…]

Thundercrack!

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Craig Sorensen

There is no film quite like Thundercrack! (1975), an art film parody of 50’s Hollywood melodrama, film noir and Old-Dark-House tropes masquerading as a porno film. Filtered through the eyes of filmmakers Curt McDowell (Load) and George Kuchar (Hold Me While I’m Naked, The Craven Sluck), the film contains all the hallmarks of their previous underground hits, sort of mashed together in a wonderful, one-of-a-kind film that has never been duplicated and never will. And unlike more mainstream, palatable “transgressive” films (cough-Rocky Horror-cough), Thundercrack! still retains it’s shock value. Try watching this film with your parents. [Read more…]