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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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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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

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.

[Read more…]

Cyclo

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Marc Savlov
Dir. Tran Anh Hung

Bizarre, arresting, and wholly original, Cyclo (1995) is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, except perhaps in uneasy slumbers. Set in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City, writer-director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) plunges the audience head first into the seamy, restless underbelly of Vietnam’s most famous city. [Read more…]

The Addiction

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kevin Thomas

The Addiction (1995) is unlike any vampire picture you’ve ever seen–but then it was directed by Abel Ferrara, poet of urban violence, from a script by Nicholas St. John so imaginative that it gets away with being as intellectual as it is visceral. Wisely, Ferrara shot it in harsh, high-contrast black and white, for at moments it’s such a blood bath that seeing it in color would be inconceivable. For Lili Taylor, that most distinctive of actresses — at once vulnerable and nervy — it affords an amazingly rich, ambitious role. [Read more…]

Nadja

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Caryn James

As she walks through Times Square, a pale, beautiful young woman in a dramatically elegant black cape, Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) gives new meaning to the idea of New York as the city that never sleeps. A man she meets in a bar asks about her background. “Family money,” she tells him in her somber voice. “From Romania.” Soon they are making love and he is becoming one of the undead. Nadja (1994) is Michael Almereyda’s droll and stylish vampire movie, an enjoyable black-and-white fantasy that transplants Dracula’s family to contemporary New York and allows them to run across Van Helsing and his own extended family. [Read more…]

Natural Born Killers

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

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.

[Read more…]

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…]

Pink Flamingos

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Cole Smithey

John Waters’ second movie not only set the low bar for just how gross a midnight movie could be in 1972, Pink Flamingos remains to this day the most cogently transgressive and anarchic film ever made. Nowhere else in cinema will you find a singing-asshole performer — with an extended close-up on his anus’s “performance” — sex between two people with a live chicken in the middle, indecent transsexual exposure, a flasher with a salami tied to his penis, a mock-incest blow job between a “son” and his transvestite “mother,” actual eating of dog feces, and an enigmatic terrorist drag queen played by the incomparable Divine. [Read more…]

The Grandmother

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

By Alci Rengifo

If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]