The Greek neo-noir Wednesday 04:45 was published in 2015, but is set in 2010, at the height of the financial crisis. Yet Alexis Alexiou is not even so much concerned with the debts itself. Both Greece's economic problems and the mafia loan for the protagonist Stelios remain abstract; the director only uses it to describe a condition.
The film strings together a chains of dependencies: between big and small gangsters, bosses and employees, men and women, fathers and sons. There…
In 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer created one of the most remarkable vampire films in cinema history. Vampyr is clearly less strictly composed than the Dane's other works and draws us into a magical parallel world with a surreal flood of images. With great shadow effects, the hybrid of sound and silent film builds up a fairy-tale atmosphere and develops into a meandering fever dream that can hardly be deciphered in retrospect. It is closer to David Lynch than to Dracula.…
J. G. Ballard's most remarkable novel Crash was long considered unfilmable: the 240 pages are bursting with explicit sex; Ballard describes the act in an ice-cold and medical style, and the interiors of cars, deformed bodies and sex mix in an increasingly offbeat way. Ballard depicts a horror vision in which technology alienates the characters from their own humanity.
A fitting subject for David Cronenberg, who adapts Ballard's hyperrealism with a paradoxical trick: He combines an intimate storytelling with a…
Johnny Guitar is the most unusual western of its time. Director Nicholas Ray uses the genre as a foil for a larger-than-life melodrama that inverts gender roles and vibrates with sex. The colorful images and a political subtext further enhance this low budget classic.
Everything in this film - threats, shootings, lynchings - results from sexual power and the greed for physicality. The character of Joan Crawford is (also) antagonized for her sexual self-determination. The antagonist Emma Small, on the…
