Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★½ 4

  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 4

  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 Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

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

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

  cronenberg finds his usual interests of identity and transformation inside this thorny romance at the intersection of imperialism, espionage and performance. "you've shown me your true self, and what i love was the lie... a perfect lie, that's been destroyed."

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  Review by paul a. ★★★★½

  we become the performances we put on for others

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  Review by shookone ★★★½ 1

  shouldn't be missed out on in any gender patriarchal hegemonial colonial class all over the western world. Cronenberg anticipated all our contemporary updated discourses in his body cinema early on anyhow.

  an overlong elegiacal pre-story ends in brutal consequences, when perversion, passion and desire (and the own transgression) aren't assimilable, pushed into denial and a schizophren gender turn of self-destruction makes for a lofty finale.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½

  Very possibly the least romantic movie ever made and also (despite its coldness) one of the craziest - and one that only becomes more effective on successive viewings because we know the extent of John Lone's deception. It's also a remarkable case study on Orientialism and casual racism - and is even one of the most politically explicit of Cronenberg's films - but what this movie really is about, above all, is essentially heterosexuality as subject. Irons is blinded by his arrogance, yes, but also by assumption and finally what may very well be love. As we see in the films climax, Lone may very well be in love with Irons as well - but his/her duty comes first. Irons…

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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 Rafael "Parker!!" 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 Slig001 ★★★½

  David Cronenberg's film adaptation of David Henry Hwang's play; itself entwined with the opera Madame Butterfly. The film depicts a relationship between a French diplomat and a beautiful opera singer. It's a relationship apparently based on love, but actually based on lies. The film is deliberately paced for much of the runtime, despite that it is a truncated version of the stage play. The original plot of Madame Butterfly reaches across the narrative of this film, though many aspects are twisted and subverted. The narrative is enthused with points about Western Imperialism and cultural differences between East and West but the film has far more interesting things to say about the nature of love. Once the twist is revealed, the…

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  Review by DNA cinephile🏳️‍🌈 ★★★★ 5

  M. Butterfly. 1993. Directed by David Cronenberg.

  DNA’s 600th Review:
  
  For our 600th review, we chose David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly because it is an LGBTQ story and this is pride month. M. Butterfly’s attraction to David Cronenberg was strong because he had seen the play and he was convinced that he was the correct director because his films focused on identity and metamorphosis. The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988) focused on gender and identity specifically. Of course Crimes of the Future (2022) is also about identity, freedom to use one’s body or modify one’s body without Government interference (e.g. The National Organ Registry) but it had not been made. My point is David Cronenberg has always made films that were…