Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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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. These, subjectively speaking, are seminal if often entirely sublime little gems 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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Raw

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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…]

 I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

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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…]

The Eyes of My Mother

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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…]

The Wailing

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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…]

The Lure

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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…]

Evolution

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

The opening shots of Evolution (2015), the long-awaited new feature from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, show a sumptuous underwater environment. (Her last full-length film, the eerie and provocative Innocence, came out in 2004.) The sea is so clear one might be tempted to breathe it in; the colors of the undulating forms of plant and animal life are psychedelic and virtually tactile. A young boy swimming in these waters is startled by the sight of another boy, drowned, a garishly red starfish covering his navel. [Read more…]

Mad Max: Fury Road

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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…]

Bone Tomahawk

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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…]

Baskin

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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…]

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

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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…]

The Witch

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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…]

Embrace of the Serpent

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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…]

The Tribe

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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…]

It Follows

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

The nameless, shape-shifting horror that stalks the blond, 19-year-old Jay (Maika Monroe) in David Robert Mitchell’s cool, controlled horror film, It Follows (2014), might be described as the very incarnation of paranoia. The menace, which only she can see, takes any number of forms, from a naked man standing on the roof of a house to an unsmiling old lady heading purposefully in her direction. When it appears, it is usually first glimpsed from a distance, walking slowly toward her like an expressionless zombie. Although Jay repeatedly flees, she can never shake the sense that it is out there somewhere and knows her precise location. [Read more…]

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manhola Dargis

By the time the vampire in the chador is skateboarding down a dark, desolate street, the director Ana Lily Amirpour has ensured that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) will roll on in your memory. The vampire, a Persian-speaking waif called the Girl (Sheila Vand), also wears a striped fishing shirt and an occasional smear across her mouth that isn’t lipstick. She’s taken the skateboard from a nameless tyke (Milad Eghbali), whose indomitable quality and threadbare clothes evoke the children populating Abbas Kiarostami’s early films and, in turn, those of Italian neorealism. Whatever the inspiration, the kid is just one of a number of character types drifting through Ms. Amirpour’s cinematic fun house. [Read more…]

Under The Skin

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Geoffrey O’Brien

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is a film with the courage of its silences and ellipses. Most easily categorized as a species of science fiction, it deftly evades verbal explanation and explicit continuity. It is in fact based on a well-received science fiction novel by Michel Faber, concerning an alien being who has been sent to northern Scotland in the guise of a woman to pick up and trap men for consumption by other aliens. But Glazer seems to have ended by omitting most of the narrative content of his source, taking away backstory and motivation bit by bit until what is left is deliberately fragmentary and open-ended. [Read more…]

Maria Bamford: The Special Special Special!

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Jason Zinoman

What the comedian Maria Bamford really wants is the approval of her parents.

That’s not armchair analysis. In The Special Special Special! (2012), which she released online at chill.com, Ms. Bamford performs an hour of stand-up for her mother and father as they sit on a couch. By replacing a typical audience with her original one, she breathes life into a cliché by making it literal and creates a compelling dynamic that is as eccentric as her singularly funny comedy.  [Read more…]

Post Tenebras Lux

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manohla Dargis

Mesmerizing, mysterious, willfully perverse, the Mexican movie Post Tenebras Lux (2012) opens with two scenes, one realistic, the other fantastical. In the first a toddler roams across a muddy country field at dusk as thunder booms and dogs chase cows, horses and donkeys.

It’s a cacophonous, stunning sequence. The edges of the images are softly blurred, the light is magical — although it isn’t remotely clear what that girl and those animals have to do with the following scene of a red, radiant devil with horns, hooves, swishing tail and a literal toolbox entering a house at night, like a handyman from Hades on an emergency call. It’s no wonder that a young boy in the house who sees this bizarre apparition stops cold to gawk. [Read more…]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

Last May, when a Cannes Film Festival jury headed by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d’Or (2011), there was widespread surprise and a few eruptions of outrage. The film — from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has become a familiar presence on the festival circuit over the past decade — is unquestionably strange, at times mystifyingly oblique. Those who insist on a linear narrative or an easily identifiable set of themes may find themselves puzzled, perhaps to the point of frustration. But it is hard to see how this movie, with its contemplative mood and genial, curious spirit, could make anybody angry. On the contrary: encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss. [Read more…]

Take Shelter

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by A. O. Scott

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis,” says Dewart, Curtis’s best friend and co-worker. (Dewart is played by Shea Whigham, Curtis by the amazing Michael Shannon.) “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man: take a look at his life and say, ‘That’s good.’ ”

A sinister corollary to Dewart’s homespun truism might be that the greatest fear a man can experience is that of losing the good life he has. It is this anxiety, which afflicts Curtis in especially virulent form, that defines the mood of Take Shelter (2011), Jeff Nichols’s remarkable new film. It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.

[Read more…]