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.
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.
