Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★½ 2

  A film about Western imperialism and the cultural revolution, David Cronenberg-style!

  This film implies that America's disastrous escalation of the Vietnam war was because of one horny French diplomat whose affair with a Chinese opera singer led him to project his own fantasy of the exotic orient and Asian submissiveness into his intelligence briefings. There's a lot more going on in this one. A brutal and gut-wrenching look at how much of what we regard as love between men and women is an artifice that each person builds out of the other.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  "You are all here because you do not know how to dig into the flinty soil of China and discover its revolutionary future."

  We have induced this dysmorphia with our aggressive privilege, our delusion, and our occasional delight in taking what we want when it suits us, only to be seduced, consumed and finally abandoned by the power and potential of this transformation.

  "He was very responsive to my ancient Oriental ways of love, all of which I invented just for him."

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  Review by Sally Jane Black Sabbath 2

  If this intended to have some sort of commentary on the racist perceptions of Europeans/Americans in China, it failed, mixing a little bit of awareness of stereotypes and with straight depictions of other stereotypes. The writer knows the words "imperialism" and "reactionary" but never once shows the impact of imperialism (instead, we more or less find if not sympathy then less contempt for imperialists here than for communism) and the truth of reactionaries' ideologies (i.e., fascism, etc.). It simply throws the vocabulary around for flavor while demonizing China with a shallow depiction of the political climate at the time. For all the talk of the French losing "Indochina" and the Americans' intentions to bomb, not once is it really acknowledged…

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  Review by Rafael Jovine ★★★★

  Action!: The Many Bodies Of One David Cronenberg

  Cronenberg and Irons team up again for another subtle take on the body genre, where there might be not disgusting horror and imagery, but more of a transformation with political and social ties-in. This, by now, has to be the most endearing and touching movie made by David, something that he will unfortunately not repeat. The script does a great job illustrating the very own themes in the play and translating them into the relationships between these two. Making you wonder whether whose the slave and whose the owner, plus setting this all against the backdrop of the Chinese revolution was perfect. Last but not least, Howard Shore score here isn't very…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  Only a Pisces could have made this - love as a political weapon lmao

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  Review by The Critic ★★★★★

  Cronenberg enseñando desde el siglo 20 la leccion mas importante de la vida', nunca te enamores de una china, sobretodo si tiene pito.

  Una Jodida Obra Maestra, In the Mood for Love quien te juna y recontra juna.

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  Review by Florin Scanlon ★★★½

  What the...

  You almost had me there Mr. Cronenberg. At first I thought this was going to be a fairly straightforward love story but that's not how you ride the horse. Your style of riding a horse would be something like this: turned upside down beneath the horse between its pairs of legs, facing and holding its "adornment".

  Even more impressive, the film (based on a play of the same name) is actually inspired by a true story. Rene Gallimard (Jeremy Irons) is a French diplomat working at the embassy located in Beijing, China during the 60s. There he becomes infatuated with a Chinese opera performer, Song Liling. As it turns out, Song is a spy instructed by the Chinese…

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  Review by Joe ★★★★½

  "It's not the story, it's the music."

  Recently got to see Cronenberg's The Fly again, and was struck by how romantic and beautiful it is, despite the monster movie trappings. Here he does something even more sumptuous and mysterious, and I got almost as swept up in it as I did with The Fly - which makes sense because in broad strokes the two aren't really so different after all. They're both about arrogant men who get transformed into something terrifying, and also like The Fly, The Butterfly is only terrifying depending on your perspective.

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  Review by Josiah Morgan

  The final minutes hold the key to all of Cronenberg's cinema.

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  Review by BrandonHabes ★★★★ 4

  You might ask, "What is Cronenbergian about espionage, gender politics, white Western fantasies, and Oriental stereotypes?" The answer: Everything. M. BUTTERFLY may lack the extreme body horror metaphors familiar to Cronenberg's work, but it still treats the body as an endless source of pleasure and repulsion, a site where sexual fantasy and puritanical disgust converge to create something at once grotesque and beautiful. Cronenberg explores the concept of "the perfect woman," a corrupt concept made flesh by a toxic male culture which inspired it. In the process he somehow manages to be passionless yet compelling, clinical yet never forgettable. I never found myself emotionally drawn in, though I gotta say: the exotic journey of watching a man disappear into a…

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  Review by Lebowskidoo 🎃👻💀 ★★★★

  Not your usual Cronenberg movie. Jeremy Irons and John Lone fall in love in 1960's China, except Irons thinks Lone is a woman. It's a true story as well. A bit slow but it's well made and you can't help but keep watching to see where it goes.

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  Review by rotch ★★★★★ 2

  Bajo el microscopio cronenbergesco, una muestra de cómo el deseo desenfrenado puede ser el catalizador de una mutación. Visto en el macro, una muestra del colonialismo como manifestación de una mutación.

  Jeremy Irons en los últimos 30 minutos se deteriora como brundlefly en cámara rápida. Es una de las cosas más tristes que he visto en mi vida.

  Este era uno de los huecos que me faltaba llenar en la filmografía Cronenberg. No tenía idea que fuera un hueco tan grande.