Text of Sex and the City: Radu Jude’s banging Bucharest symphony – my introduction to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), screened 9th December 2021 at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford – in which I consider the tripartite film “as a recalcitrant member of the Romanian New Wave, as a sex comedy, as a…
The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu) first published by musicOMH In Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th century masterwork The Divine Comedy, Dante is given a guided tour of the Underworld by fellow-poet Virgil, the better to help him on his eventual ascent to Heaven. So it is hardly a coincidence that Cristi…
This year, something of a habit is emerging, as nuns have become the focus of an inordinate amount of horror cinema. Aislinn Clark’s The Devil’s Doorway and Darren Lynn Bousman’ St Agatha used their cloistered settings to explore the manner in which both church and society in the last century abused and exploited so-called ‘fallen’ women…
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days published in Film International Issue #32, March/April 2008 Romania’s Communist era may have come to an abrupt end in the popular uprising of 1989 that saw Ceaucescu deposed and executed, but it is only recently that Romanian cinema has undergone its own revolution, transforming from a cottage industry…