Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

Streaming: The Substance and the best body horror for Halloween

Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome body horror satire on ageing, poised for a Halloween streaming release, is a welcome female take on a genre that preys on our deepest fears

The surprise success of Terrifier 3 in cinemas this month – with stories of underage viewers buying tickets to family fare and sneaking into the low-budget gorefest instead – underlines a constant in the mutable horror genre: people will never lose their morbid fascination with the worst possible things that can happen to our bodies. Or the worst impossible things, which is where body horror cinema comes in: the terror of our natural anatomical order becoming, well, unnaturally disordered.

French film-maker Coralie Fargeat, meanwhile, plays on our fear of natural and unnatural bodily deterioration in her swaggering, supersized horror-comedy The Substance (Mubi), a satire on Hollywood ageism that is as broad as a dual carriageway but has enough blunt-force impact to have kept divided audiences talking since its cinema release last month. It cannily makes its streaming debuton 31 October, conveniently sorting out many a Halloween movie night. I found the film overlong and conceptually thin, but there’s gusto in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s dual performances as chemically warring inhabitants of one has-been star’s body, and in its extravagantly disgusting vision of just how far the ageing process can be simultaneously reversed, accelerated and contorted.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9TFZQj3
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton