Popular reviews

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  Review by Sean Baker 25

  Love it. Currently my number two fave of the year. Yann Gonzalez gives us a beautiful love letter to giallo cinema and like Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let the Corpses Tan), he captures the look and vibe of the genre and era perfectly. Bravo!

  Vanessa Paradis is wonderful and has the perfect face for this film.

  M83's score is beautifully melodic. And where did cinematographer Simon Beaufils come from? There's been incredibly shot films this year but this one takes the cake for me. And here I go again but must point out the to-die-for images that are only possible by capturing on celluloid.
  Lush 35mm shot in Techniscope. There's some 16mm in there as well.

  16 mm (Kodak…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 2

  Formally an almost entirely unreconstructed modern giallo, perfectly delivering every scuzzy beat and baffling narrative twist, but so suffused with lust and longing that it achieves this constant hypnodrone eroticism. Stay for the credits.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 2

  HOMO
  CIDAL

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  Review by Tony the Terror 🎃 ★★★★★ 26

  Damn I really loved this! A gay giallo, what’s not to love right? I was incredibly drawn into the story...like so drawn in that I gave my husband my signature eye roll when he asked a question about what was happening and immediately hated the person who sent me a text before I even know who they were. I was invested, k?

  And I mean, how could I not be. It’s a delightful modern take on one of my favorite genres of film with some serious homages to the classics, especially Argento. The lighting is full of those beautiful red and blue hues. Plus, y’all this movie is Gay®. Gay gay gay gay gay. GAY. And yet, surprisingly tame in…

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  Review by Hari Nef 2

  “was i a good fag?”

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★½ 6

  French queer giallo that drifts into fantastique territory and hands down contains exactly what that empty husk of a movie I watched before this (strange color of your blah blah) lacks so desperately—emotion. Knife + Heart is such an apt title and I’m estatic that there’s finally a contemporary giallo that isn’t focused on a checklist of every trope imaginable or samples of second tier giallo needle drops. Sure... there’s homages in this but nothing about this feels smug. 

  I loved where this went with the second act, delving into the fantastique elements way more than I imagined it would—unsettling me in a positive way with just enough dreamy atmos to sweep me away in the process... just long enough to…

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½

  Surprisingly tender, not just because of its central love story, but for how Gonzalez uses France's gay porn boom as a means to explore cinema's ability to allow marginalized people to see and recreate idealized versions of their own lives on screen.

  As much as I like all of the more overt genre elements -- especially the heavily eroticized death sequences and the mid-film detour into the fantastique -- it's the way that Gonzalez is able to work them into an evocation of the era that never feels beholden to the past that makes this resonate so well with me.

  (I always hate focusing on references, but I kind of really loved seeing explicit nods to Diabolical Dr. Z, New York Ripper, NYC Inferno, and real-life figures like Anne-Marie Tensi and François About throughout this)

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  Review by Lucy ★★★ 1

  AFI 2018: film #5

  “yesterday we came, tomorrow we die”

  part gritty realism, part dreamy fantasy, but all together really really gay. the mystery is more interesting than i thought it would be, and there are some beautifully nasty moments that stand out. overall an interesting way to spend an afternoon

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  Review by pd187 ★★★★½ 7

  was skeptical going in but this is the real deal - despite general dicklessness theres a charged sweetness to all the cum'n'tanlines hookups & our homo-artcore directrix vanessa paradis has a real tragic sense of humor & cynical intelligence i didnt expect from someone i last saw in YOGA HOSERS. introducing her bottom-out drunk & dumped by her gf over a payphone had me locked in right out the gate! love how they offset the horny sex murders & prerequisite red/blue neon synth with some of the supernatural fairy tale/mystery elements from so many messy 70s euro-horrors everybody seems to forget about now. Watch This Gay Giallo Now!!

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★½ 7

  Has a special place in my heart for being the first queer movie I so viscerally connected with and, to this day, remains firmly at the top. In hyper-stylizing the grimier aspects of queer media that I normally find fairly frivolous it manages to evoke a feeling of arousal, revulsion, and, most unusual of all, immaculacy, that last aspect the one that transforms what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill erotic horror flick into something truly sublime. Editing, audio design, costuming, etc. are all clearly done with a purpose besides mere aestheticism, a singular purpose that marries the genre trappings with the core motif of the film: that of the invisibility of queerness within ̶q̶u̶e̶e̶r̶ love.

  Within the world of Knife+Heart…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  From what I had heard of this before, I was expecting something with tenderness, warmth, kindness to it.

  This is icy neon hell. This is tragedy and agony, broken hearts and poisonous rage.

  There are a few stylistic choices I would have forgone myself, such as the flashback sequences' color palette and segues, the sterile white final scenes and the unrepentantly toxic lead character both infuse this with the right tone: misery and horror, a myth of release. This is a blend of giallo and slasher, of pornographic setting and noir aspirations, of raw fantasy and disturbing reality.

  There is no redemption here; only conclusion. Nothing in this suggests that the horrors we see are okay, are justified, are reasonable.…

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★★½ 38

  #Giallo

  I loved it. A modern-day giallo that is both brutal and tender? That cuts with its explicit sexual content but heals with its implicit tragedy of love? And it is French? Of course I loved it.

  Un couteau dans le coeur evokes classic giallo but it is also its own individual genre and style. It has perhaps the genre’s most visually brutal killings but it also encapsulates its own tragic love story within its high-strung explicitness. It balances the onscreen violence with an impassioned outcry for a love that has been long buried under the ashes. It builds an empathy with the main character that makes the experience more intimate and the killings more immediate.

  Anne (the main character)…