Popular reviews

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Living. It still holds up incredible well even though I assume it would turn social media into hell if it comes out today and people found out it exists. Collard claimed he only ended playing the lead because he failed to convince any bankable French star to do so, but it is hard to imagine it working with anyone else in the role, the narcistic inflatuation is far too inseparable from everything that is great about it. Savage Nights is often compared to Pialat, in part because it is so interested in chilling form of objective image made out of something so personal, part because Collard had worked as an assistant in Loulou and A Nos Amours, but it also…

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  Review by Catherine Stebbins ★★★★

  AIDS stories, still, are mostly either told from heterosexual perspectives or are glaringly saccharine or simply don’t exist. Sift through all of that and hopefully you’ll eventually find your way to Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights, a searingly open and personal portrait. Collard, the writer, director, and star, was HIV-positive, dying three days before the César’s (where the film took the top prize that year). He smartly addresses the disease by not addressing it. Jean’s (Collard) resolute inability to process haunts the entire film and his actions (or rather inaction). It is made the backdrop for a story about toxic relationships, where Jean’s condition indirectly informs all interpersonal drama.

  Jean wears a key around his neck, a permanent personal indicator of…

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  Review by Rhys ★★★★

  Feels like an expression of life in all it's anguish and hurt, as emotions escalate to self-annihilation in tumultuous anxiety confronting what it means to live and remembering to breath again as if all this time we have been drowning. The central narcissism of the characters, their tantrums and desire of ownership of their love and desire becomes complicated with Collard's presence as director, writer and star which grants it a richness that is as exhilarating as it is exasperating and exhausting-impossible to separate the fictional to the possibly autobiographical. The sense of abandonment in the pursuit of pleasure is intoxicating, the restless movement of the camera helps sustain an impressionistic sense of these lives that is a kaleidoscope of…

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  Review by Willa ★★★

  A very defiant love story that can be all over the place but is assertive in regards to living and existence so it definitely leaves a mark

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  Review by aga ★★★½

  2021 Queer Film Challenge 30. A film featuring an actual bisexual character.

  Very dramatic, at times so much that it kind of cheapens the film, making it feel like a telenovela. The main characters are toxic, manipulative and reckless. And yet, the movie is really compelling. It feels much shorter than it is, probably because some of the moments are really tense. The characters' (there's more than one) bisexuality is on the forefront, which is awesome.
  Overall, Savage Nights is a movie that is hard to love, but quite easy to admire.

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  Review by alexander ★★★½

  far from a sob story, it is not looking to garner any sympathy for telling the story of a HIV+ queer artist, but neither do i agree (even with the director, based on a quick wiki scan!) that AIDS can be said to be only a "backdrop" when its existence is impossible to ignore throughout. this is not to say that it is pushed front and center at every moment, but it is lurking, and obviously becomes consequential during sex, but also in the protagonist's perception of how others see him, and how this prism of thinking gets refracted through his own vacillating mental strategies of struggling with his condition.

  the beginning is near-phantasmagoria, a travelogue that feels more like…

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  Review by alexbhades ★★★★

  Recuerdo que cuando vi por primera vez este film me parecio desgarrador, una historia de amor llevada al limite.
  Años despues la he buscado para revisarla y ver cuanto de verdad anidaba en mi recuerdo, y buscando información sobre ella me ha dejado completamente traspuesto enterarme que la historia no solo es verdadera, sino que es la autobiografia del que fue director, guionista, actor y compositor de la mitad de la banda sonora. y para rematarlo murio al poco de hacer la pelicula de sida, uno de los subargumentos del film.
  Apartando algunos vaivenes del guion, y que es bastante francesa, me sigue impactando y es de dificil digestión, pero realista y directa como pocas.

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  Review by Gonzalo Cassina Mantilla ★★★½

  Un testamento desesperado y egocéntrico.

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  Review by BrunoLD ★★★★

  Spanish/English Review:
  Gran película, única y muy especial. Me parece que mucha gente no consigue ver las virtudes que tiene, pero en parte lo comprendo, porque no son virtudes cinematográficas, es la primera y única película de su director (murió de sida poco después) y por lo tanto no es que tenga nada puramente cinematográfico que sea impresionante; pero sí que es impresionante lo que cuenta y sobre todo como se cuenta.
  No recuerdo ahora mismo algún caso parecido, pero ésta es la película de un hombre que sabe que va a morir, protagonizada por él mismo, escrita por él mismo y dirigida por él mismo y en la que cuenta lo que quiere como quiere, con lo que sería…

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  Review by mxtxxxx ★★★★★

  pq um cara com uma mente dessas só tem um filme eu preciso de mais

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  Review by rohmermaniac

  C’est vraiment très pénible comme histoire mais comment je peux me fâcher avec le plus doux des anges qui ait jamais existé ?

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  Review by Daniel Hållquist ★★★★

  I saw this movie when I was 20, and it made me rethink what a protagonist in a movie can be.

  Basically it's about self-denial.

  Jean, who is HIV-positive, has two relationships. One with Laura, one with Samy. He has unprotected sex with both.

  Laura becomes unstable when he tells her he is infected, but she won't stop seeing him.

  It's hard to get a grip of Jean, who is narcissistic and lashes out at people, but like I said: Jean is in self-denial about his disease, which explains his behavior. Explains, don't justify.

  This is complex stuff. Highly recommended.