I typically aim to use this last post as my awards clean-up, wherein I tackle the prize-winning films I didn’t address in my previous dispatches. This year will have to be different, since Spike Lee’s jury trophied many of the films I already found generative enough to have given them space here. Not atypically, though, the panel failed to hand any accolades to the two films that in my opinion were the most laudable among the competition slate—namely, Bruno Dumont’s rapturously off-kilter France, which could have justifiably taken any prize on the menu except Best Actor (although Macron’s unknowing cameo […]

We’re still waiting here in the States to see Gaspar Noe’s previous collaboration with Saint Laurent, Lux Æterna, which premiered in Cannes in 2019, but the fashion house has just dropped a new short by the French director that’s well worth a late-night watch. Starring Charlotte Rampling and a group of models — Anok Yai, Antonia Przedpelski, Assa Baradji, Aylah Mae Peterson, Clara Deshayes, Grace Hartzel, Kim Schell, Mica Arganaraz, Miriam Sanchez, Sora Choi, and Stefania Cristian — the film begins a model’s frenzied run through crimson-lit woods at night (a not to Suspiria, perhaps, as well as Last House on […]

Gaspar Noé may never mature in the ways his detractors wish (rather, many of them long for the day that he disappears completely), and yet his work, especially from his erotic 3D film, Love (2015), to the present, continues to surprise me. Creator of his own distinct cinematic idiom—one almost always described as both formally and thematically extreme—Noé returns to Cannes only a year after his Directors’ Fortnight success story, Climax, with a medium-length, stroboscopic, essayistic polyptych titled Lux Æterna. Even as Lux opens with a gently flickering title card that quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky on epilepsy—a state he said offers […]

A Travis Bickle wannabe is shitkicked at a neon-streaked Parisian club — it’s the new video from Gaspar Noe, which brings a near-Irreversible level of violence and the director’s trademark twisting overhead camera to a club track by the French producer. Check it out above.

“Birth is a unique opportunity. Death is an extraordinary experience. Life is a collective impossibility.” –CLIMAX (2018) The film A dance company celebrating the end of their rehearsal on a snowy night in 1996 lose themselves to bacchanalian depravity in Climax, divided into two parts, each shot in long, continuous takes. The latest from Gaspar Noé, the director of Enter the Void and Love, returns to themes of his greatest dreams turned into nightmares through the hypnotic expressions of dance — and some surreptitiously drugged sangria. Who I spoke with    Gaspar Noé: Director, Writer, Co-Editor, Co-Producer Serge Catoire: Line […]

In a genuinely shocking turn of events, self-promoting shit-stirrer Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax — re-screened for festival-goers yesterday after it won the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award — is one of the best and most broadly-loved films to premiere in Cannes this year, pleasing devoted followers while winning over a fair many skeptics in the process. I’ll confess to being reasonably on board with his let’s-not-call-it-a-“project” coming into this one — especially when he works in 3D, as he did in his throwback to ’70s erotica, Love (2015) — though my enthusiasm for his movies has been invariably mitigated by […]

A threesome in 3-D and unsimulated sex in a simulated cinematic hyper-reality: that’s what Gaspar Noé’s latest film Love has been promising for months. At Cannes in 2014, producer Vincent Maraval teased audiences with explicit promo materials, pledging plenty of penis, nipple and onscreen ejaculate. While the film has all three in abundance, it turns out Love is more about loss than sex. The surprisingly sentimental tale begins with Murphy (Karl Glusman) receiving a desperate voicemail message from an ex’s mother. Murphy’s an American in Paris with a French girlfriend, crying baby and New Year’s Day hangover — a trifecta about […]

On Wednesday, October 28, Filmmaker Magazine will be presenting at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center a Master Class on filmmaking with the provocative Paris-based, Argentinian auteur Gaspar Noé. As his latest film, Love, a romantic melodrama with hardcore sex and shot in 3D, prepares to hit American screens, we’ll be screening Noé‘s first, rarely-screened picture, Carne, and then discussing his subsequent work. With its widescreen cinematography, William Castle-ish flourishes and spasms of ultra-violence, Carne, a tale of a racist horse-meat butcher in the South of France bent on avenging what he believes to be the rape of […]

Two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday, made me think back to Ben Lerner’s year-old novel 10:04. In it, there’s a conversation about a specific male performance that supposedly begins around middle school and high school-age: “You take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.” Men performing their maleness through a leaky member shows up in Wim Wenders’s Everything Will be Fine and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This […]

He’s played a troubled youth in the Paris ghettos in La Haine, a vengeful husband in Irreversible, and an abusive ballet company director in Black Swan. One pattern is clear with French actor Vincent Cassel: he works with directors of a special breed who can’t be boxed up neatly within a genre. His latest Cannes film is no exception. Cassel partnered with Italian director Matteo Garrone to play the role of a casanova Medieval king who’s always on the search for his next sexual conquest in Tale of Tales. Based upon the stories of Giambattista Basile, Europe’s original fairytale scribe, […]