Mother, May I? opens, as indeed it closes, with a view of the countryside seen through a window – an idyllic image of nature that conceals a human drama just beyond its frame. For the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the curling smoke of a lit cigarette balanced on an ashtray, and then an…
The Ninth Configuration first published by Little White Lies, as the eighth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “You’re going to die up there.” In William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, whose script William Peter Blatty has adapted from his own 1971 novel, the possessed 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) creepily directs these words at an astronaut in attendance…
Review first published by FilmLand Empire His first feature, Katalin Varga (2009), is a rape/revenge story shot in Transylvania with exclusively Hungarian dialogue. His second feature, the metacinematic mystery Berberian Sound Studio (2012), is set in Seventies Italy and uses the grammar and tropes of giallo to explore the misogynies in and around an unseen…