LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)
Review for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.
“There’s nothing left for me, just memories… and the apartment.”
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is as haunting as it is infamous. Set almost entirely within the crumbling walls of a dim Parisian apartment, the film captures the raw connection between two strangers—Paul (Marlon Brando), a grieving widower, and Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a young woman grasping for her own identity. Brando delivers an astonishing performance, almost entirely improvisational, an unfiltered portrayal of rage and grief. Schneider’s presence adds an unsettling innocence to the chaos of their affair.
File Under: Erotic Melancholia | Arthouse | Jazz
The film’s jazz-heavy score by Gato Barbieri sets the tone: smoky, mournful, and tense, perfectly matched to Bertolucci’s unflinching vision of intimacy at its most dangerous. It’s a film about loneliness and release, desire and decay—its themes layered in shadows, whispers, and muted color palettes.
Last Tango has continued to stir controversy. Its notorious “butter scene” and filming revelations from Schneider point toward exploitation. These conversations are now inseparable from the film’s legacy, complicating its impact while demanding a more critical lens, whilst adding a layer of libertine-ian mystique.
For all its controversy, Last Tango in Paris remains a stark meditation on grief, isolation, and the harmful ways we seek connection when searching for meaning. Bertolucci’s Paris feels frozen in time—disjointed, melancholic, and perfectly suited to winter’s darkest moods.
"Last Tango in Paris", Bernardo Bertolucci. 1972, Italy. Running Time: 126 Minutes. English-French. Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video and streaming on Pluto TV.
LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024)
A24 / Rose Glass’s queer crime drama is neon hued sex and violence taken to the extreme.
File Under: Neo-Noir, Queer Cinema, Thriller
"Love Lies Bleeding" marks Rose Glass's transition from the psychological depths of Saint Maud to a simmering landscape of desire and destruction. Set in the stark desert of 1989 New Mexico, the film pulses with a carefully calibrated tension and neon cinematography that recalls Nicolas Winding Refn's most stylized work. A24 films is the appropriate studio for the director to realize her vision. Glass demonstrates remarkable precision, transforming a lurid premise into a visually arresting meditation on violence and connection.
Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian deliver thrilling performances and electric chemistry on screen, inhabiting characters who navigate a world where love and brutality are inextricably linked. Ed Harris’s portrayal of the embodiment of moral depravity is not to be scoffed at either.
The film's soundtrack features tracks by Grace Jones, Patrick Cowley and Gina X Performance, a nod to the queer and androgynous of the past; the soundscape creates another layer of narrative sophistication, while amplifying the movie's sensual and subversive undertones. Cinematographically elegant, Rose Glass’s direction is unflinching. "Love Lies Bleeding" confirms Glass as a filmmaker of distinctive vision.
"Love Lies Bleeding", Rose Glass. 2024, USA. Running Time: 104 Minutes. English.Available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Vudu.
HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s hallucinogenic assault on modern civilization.
Jodorowsky’s fever dream of a capitalist apocolypse.
File Under: Surrealism, Psychedelia, Mysticism, Avant-Garde Cinema.
Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky detonated cinema with his "Holy Mountain", a savage hallucination that transforms film into a ritualistic assault on modern humanity's diseased soul, a grenade lobbed directly into the rotting heart of Western civilization.
From its opening moments - a Christ-like Thief covered in flies, marinating in his own urine - Jodorowsky declares war on the conventions of narrative structure. Lizard conquistadors re-enact historical atrocities. Naked children parade through streets dripping with surreal violence. Tourists photograph massacres like pornographic souvenirs. Each frame is a provocative middle finger to cinematic tradition, a kaleidoscopic of societal madness.
The film mutates between brutal satire and mystical allegory. When the Thief joins the Alchemist's band of archetypal figures— each representing one of society's corrupt institutions— the mission becomes a metaphysical heist against the Immortals, those bloodless rulers perched in their mountaintop fortress of pure capital. Strap on your seat belt.
“Holy Mountain”, Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1973, Mexico. Running Time: 114 Minutes. English-Spanish. Available for rent on Amazon Prime and Roku.
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (2016)
2016 James Baldwin biopic / documentary
File Under: Documentary, Black Power, Civil Rights, Literary Cinema.
“I Am Not Your Negro" is a fitting meditation on MLK Day. Raoul Peck adapts the novel James Baldwin never completed, “Remember This House", into a film discourse, focusing the lens on the history of race in America via assassinations of key civil rights leaders (Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin), the impact of racist cinematic imagery, and the continuation of the black struggle in the 21st century. The exacting words of James Baldwin narrated by Samuel L. Jackson sit heavily, a vivid reminder that the work is far from over.
"I Am Not Your Negro", Raoul Peck. 2016, USA-France.
Running Time: 93 Minutes. English-French.
Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube
PAPRIKA (2006)
2006 psychological thriller/ anime
File Under: Psychedelic Anime, Surrealism, Dream Logic, Sci-Fi Masterpiece.
Satoshi Kon’s 2006 anime feature has been described as an acid trip for good reason; when a machine that allows therapists to enter patients’ dreams is stolen, chaos ensues, and the only one capable of finding the culprit is Dr. Atsuko Chiba. When entering dreams Chida is transformed into an alter ego, Paprika. As she pursues the thief with her partners, she is forced into mind bending and terrifying situations, where the line between dream and reality is irrevocably blurred. This flick has been credited for inspiring Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and it’s a worthy take if you’re interested in psychological thrillers exploring complex questions about identity and existence. Available for rent on Prime and Apple TV.
"Paprika", Satoshi Kon. 2006, Japan.
Running Time: 90 Minutes. Japanese.
Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube.
DIVA (1981)
1981 French cyberpunk thriller
File Under: French New Wave Revival, Neon Noir, High Style, Operatic Thriller.
Jean Jacques Beinex delivers a feast for the eyes (and ears) in his first feature length “DIVA”, a genre bending cyberpunk thriller, love story, and testament to the power of music. In “Diva” Beinex explodes conventional narrative structure to pursue a new style of filmmaking that would be coined by French critic Raphael Bassan as “cinema du look”.
When an opera recording is pirated by an obsessive fan, the forces of the criminal underbelly of Paris are awakened, events are triggered, characters weave through the futuristic industrial wastelands + subways of the city, storylines combine, an epic chase scene ensues, the clash between high and low brow society forms before our eyes; all moving the visual, thematic and stylistic elements to the fore, further enhanced by a modern remaster of the original 35mm.
"Diva", Jean-Jacques Beineix. 1981, France.
Running Time: 117 Minutes. French.
Available for rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022)
2022 sardonic comedy
Ruben Östlund’s caustic satireTriangle of Sadness takes a wrecking ball to the excesses of wealth, privilege, and social hierarchies. Split into three acts, the film moves from the sterile artifice of the fashion industry to the grotesque opulence of a luxury cruise and finally lands in the chaos of survival, where the power dynamics flip entirely.
File Under: Satire, Social Commentary, Modern Dark Comedy, Class Critique.
Östlund, fresh from his success with Force Majeure, turns his lens to despicable characters representative of the worst of capitalism: vapid influencers, bored billionaires, and inept authority figures. Among them is Carl (Harris Dickinson), a male model grappling with his fragile ego, and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), his influencer girlfriend, in a deeply transactional relationship. Their luxury cruise—captained by an alcoholic and unhinged Marxist drunkard (played by the brilliant Woody Harrelson)—descends into chaos. Vomit fountains, dysfunction, and primal absurdity reveal that, when stripped of wealth and privilege, humanity’s most grotesque instincts emerge.
The cinematography embraces clean, hyper-realistic frames that accentuate the emptiness of wealth. The score crescendos to add a perverse sense of beauty to the film’s most unsettling moments. Östlund builds tension by letting his camera linger, allowing discomfort to marinate into black humor.
Awarded the 2022 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Triangle of Sadness’s blunt-force satire struck a nerve, with critics debating whether it skewers capitalism effectively or simply revels in its own shock value. But that seems to be precisely Östlund’s point: there’s no clean moral takeaway here.
A perfect counter-programming for those tired of the saccharine Triangle of Sadness is Ruben Östlund having fun with a cinematic shipwreck you can’t ignore.
"Triangle of Sadness", Ruben Östlund. 2022, Sweden-France.
Running Time: 147 Minutes. English-Swedish.
Available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Vudu.
ROUGE
1994 french romantic mystery from tres coleurs series
Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Rouge” is the third film of his Trois Coleurs series. A chance encounter between a Geneva model named Valentine, played by the ravishing beauty Irene Jacob, and an off-putting retired judge, played by French legend Jean-Louis Trintignant, becomes a metaphysical exploration of the bonds of human relationships, the ethics of surveillance and personal privacy, and how each action in life is beautifully and frighteningly out of our control.
“This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information.”-Krzysztof Kieślowski
BACURAU
2022 Sci-fi weirdo Brazilian western.
Brazilian writers / directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Filho take on race and class in their 2019 bizarro sci-fi Western flick “Bacurau”. The film bends genres and realities whilst following a small town and eccentric set of characters in the Brazilian outback; the town’s inner quarrels are exploded by an insidious existential threat. For sure, a heavy dose of psychedelic storytelling layered with criticism of Brazilian politics and Western economic imperialism. Available on prime video premium and other platforms if you’re willing to pay a small fee. 🇧🇷
Robert Moskowitz
Minimal Conceptions
Swimmer, 1984. Whitney Museum of American Art.
Robert Moskowitz’s work is minimal and bears some associations to Pop and new image painting, but inhabits a unique territory, reduced signs hover in a blank field, the dynamic of the images presentation putting a pause on easy absorption, both sign and reading of it are pushed into a new theater, like encountering Samuel Becket’s clipped repeated text, we examine both the thing and our mechanics of perceiving it.-Dennis Kane
“Moskowitz’s spaces are unmodulated for the most part. He was able to lock himself into a room conceived with the solidity of acrylic paint. He built interior spaces with right angles and the illusion of corners and elevations. The surfaces can appear close to seamless. It’s ultimately Moskowitz’s own architectural domain nestled in his mind: warm, embracing, and claustrophobic.” - Barbara A. MacAdam
Untitled (Chain), 1991
Pastel on paper
115 x 74 in (292.1 x 188 cm)
MacAdam, Barbara A. “Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings From Four Decades | the Brooklyn Rail.” The Brooklyn Rail, 30 Apr. 2024, brooklynrail.org/2024/05/artseen/Robert-Moskowitz-Paintings-and-Drawings-from-Four-Decades.
“Robert Moskowitz.” Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org/artists/922.
“Works — Robert Moskowitz.” Robert Moskowitz, www.robertmoskowitz.org/works.
VIDEODROME
1983 psyche-fururistic-sleaze-scifi-thriller
David Cronenberg’s 1983 psychotronic, psychotropic fringe film starring James Woods as a sleazy TV station manager and Debby Harry as his sadomasochistic girlfriend, explores Marshall McClaren’s maxim “The Medium is the Message” in a frightening (albeit low tech) vision of television as a drug that blends into and transforms reality - an erotic pilot program turns out to be a snuff production; and so goes the film, ... caustic energy and bizarre sequences, frenzied sardonic sci-fi, a critique of our relationship with media prophesizing future dilemmas of the technological media age.
“The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence totally different from the one you are living… if you accept at least on some level the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, than imagination and unrepressed creativity is very dangerous to civilization.” - David Cronenberg
N.APRIS LES DES
1971 avant garde shock and awe film . Adults only.
French experimental film writer/ director, Alaine Robbe Grillet presents a remix of his own work, “Eden and After”, taking subversion to a whole new level, confronting the viewer with surreal collages of potent carnal imagery. Plot is secondary. Strap on your seat belt for a sensory overload.: “N. Took the Dice”. Full film linked below. ADULTS ONLY.
THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS
1971 Japanese experimental meditation
Shuji Terayama’s avant-garde film critiques American & Japanese materialism through the narrative of a poor young man trying to make himself a life in a capitalist society with a dysfunctional family. The imagery is psychedelic/ surreal, soundtrack is punk singalong, the cinematography experimental, a script chock full of symbolism and social commentary. Teryama in 1971, a master at work.
RED DESERT
1964 Antonioni classic starring monica vitti
“With one startling, painterly composition after another—of abandoned fishing cottages, electrical towers, looming docked ships—Red Desert creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age.” - The Criterion Collection
THE ADDICTION
1995 arthouse vampire flick
Shot in black and white in mid 90’s NYC, starring Lili Taylor and Christopher Walken, scored with golden age hip hop tracks, Abel Ferrara’s art house film exploits vampire tropes to explore religious themes of damnation, redemption and the collapse of a moral order. Backdrop of AIDS and addicts… Gritty, philosophical, visceral, adult horror business- Abel and Nicholas St. John doing their thing on the fringes. Available on YouTube and Amazon premium.
Adam Pendleton
re contextualizing language and history
Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2021, Silkscreen ink on canvas
This week’s art selection features the work of Adam Pendleton. Adam’s work uses text and images to examine the glut of codes we negotiate and the hierarchies of power embedded in them.
“Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist (whose) work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the recontextualization of history through appropriated imagery to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.””
Photo Credit:
Pace Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together
Elephant Art, Pope L. and Adam Pendleton, Art Can Mobilize Your Body
Idea Stream, Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” at MOCA
Art Forum, The Parallax View: The Art of Adam Pendleton
Moma, History Is Never Finished: An Interview with Adam Pendleton
Galerie Eva Prenhauser, Adam Pendleton
Portrait Credit: New York Times, Adam Pendleton is Rethinking the Museum
Christian Boltanski
meditations on memory
This week’s art post features the work of French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). Boltanski’s work has a contemplative, poetic, ethnological quality. Absence, the remains and impact of war, the silenced subject, and the power of memory all are investigated, as is a quiet celebration of the dignity and poetics inherent in the mundane.
“His work was rich in visual and aural impact, and open-ended in its invitation to the viewer to contemplate the past and partake in the present moment — for what has been lost and what endures.”
Photo Credit:
MetaLocus, BOLTANSKI AT IVAM: DÉPART - ARRIVÉE
Jupiter Art, CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI:THEATRE D'OMBRES
Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Art Review, The Spectres of Christian Boltanski
Nowness Asia, Everyone and No One, The Art of Christian Boltanski
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Depart-Arrive
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski Selected Works
Portrait Credit: Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Shirin Aliabadi
iranian subversion
This week’s art post features the work of Shirin Aliabadi (1973-2018). Aliabadi’s work focused on Iranian women and their unique relationship to Western culture. Not singularly a critique of Western capitalism, the work explores secular transgression, body image and female identity under a repressive religious regime.
“Shirin will always be remembered for her kind soul, the depth of her work and the mark she left on the world. The female protagonists of her best-known series presented themselves as a radical counter-design to the officially propagated image of women, and displayed a young generation’s ways of breaking free from regulations.””
Photo Credit:
Universes Art, Operation Supermarket
Phillips.com, Shirin Aliabadi
Art Fund, Shirin Aliabadi
Aperture, She captured the modern face of Iran
Portrait: The Art Newspaper, Shirin Aliabadi, known for depicting rebellious Iranian women, has died
Annette Lemieux
ideological minimalism
This week’s art post features the great work of Annette Lemieux. She works in a variety of media and works in a theater of memory, examining aporias in accepted, dominant narratives. Check her work at her website.
“She’s looked at archetypical images from art — 20th century art history, but also film — and edited them and tweaked them to give them new meaning, whether that’s cheeky or critical, She’s always taking something from the world and turning it on its head to give it new meaning.”
Photo Credit:
Mitchell Inns & Nash, Annette Lemieux
Whitney Museum, Annette Lemieux
Quote and Portrait Credit: WBUR, Annette Lemieux, Whose Art Addresses History And Politics, Wins MFA’s $10K Prize
Jean Luc Godard
french new wave master
This week’s art post is selected stills from film’s by the great Jean Luc Godard who passed this year at age 91. It is an understatement to say Godard was a giant, he profoundly impacted cinema and modern thinking several times over. His work was always advancing, changing form and challenging the status quo. He was always morally outrages and always willing to stay on the margins. He understood life’s cruelty and saw art as a tool for resistance. He celebrated the defiance of beauty, the grace of charity, and the aunthenticity of being a moral enemy of the state.
Je vous salue JLG!
