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Picture of a movie: Stranger by the Lake
Picture of a movie: Inland Empire
Picture of a movie: Hellraiser
Picture of a movie: The Neon Demon
Picture of a movie: Jennifer's Body
Picture of a movie: Seed of Chucky
Picture of a movie: High Tension
Picture of a movie: The Fly
Picture of a movie: Saint Maud
Picture of a movie: Let the Right One In
Picture of a movie: Knife + Heart
Picture of a movie: Black Swan
Picture of a movie: Cruising

13 Movies

Bury Your Gays: Queer Horror

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Queerness and queer horror — which is to say horror that is about or aestheticizes queerness, otherness, sexual deviancy, as experience, metaphor, dream, and nightmare — are embedded in the history of the genre, from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula to James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. From a masked killers (one of which uses a dildo knife) to genderqueer dolls, the films selected for this program elaborate upon and extrapolate from queerness not merely as identity but as aesthetic impulse, rooted in subversion, confrontation, camp, an understanding of queerness as a tool to challenge, or deconstruct, normative ideas in art and society. Drenched in blood, paranoia, and forbidden desire, horror is queer down to the bone.

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Saint Maud

2021
There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere - but it isn't long before Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's The Exorcist, further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.

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    Must See Films at New York Film Festival 2021

    The 59th annual New York Film Festival is upon us, back in person after a tumultuous year and last year's digital iteration of the festival. But with work from some of the most interesting and innovative filmmakers from around the world, the act of coming together again for the cinema brings with it a moving, arguably more meaningful experience. Here are some of the essential films you should catch at the festival.
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      Best Meta-Melodrama

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        Glitchcraft: Self-Reflexive Horror, Genre, and Technology

        Storytelling wouldn’t be anything without technology, and neither would genre; horror itself is so shaped and defined by the ways that we tell it, make it, and create it. From viral videotapes to mysterious records that contain bewitching spells, the technology filmmakers and artists use says as much about them, about horror, and about creation itself as the stories themselves. Urban legends spread through word of mouth in a marginalized community in one film, and are hidden from the public by the government despite heavy filmic evidence in another. These films are great horror movies, sure; but they’re also about the horror genre and how technology impacts how we interact, engage, and are shaped by those stories, technology more broadly, and the ongoing conversation between horror, technology and audiences.
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          The Best of Bond... James Bond

          As Sheryl Crow once sang, with Bond it's all martinis, girls, and guns. The British secret agent returns to theaters in Daniel Craig's final entry in his tenure in NO TIME TO DIE, out October 8. So if you've never seen a Bond film and don't know your Goldfinger from your Blofeld, your Xenia Onatopp from your Jill Masterson, or your Walther PPK from your ejector seat, or if you're a Bond fan just looking to revisit some favorites, look no further than this little primer on the sharpest, slickest agent in the world.
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