What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Freaky films and why we freakin’ love ’em, by Linsay McCulloch and Garry Mulholland
Episodes
Director Brian de Palma is known for his understated pastoral films, evoking emotion through silence and the quiet passing of time ....ha ha, just kidding, his films are crazy and this one's even more bonkers than the rest.
Margot Kidder brings her usual greatness playing twins Dominique and Danielle, and everyone else is fab too. There's copious nods to Hitchcock, maybe the best use of split-screen anywhere in cinema and lashing...
It's got Elizabeth Taylor at her luminous best! It's got Katherine Hepburn being all hysterical! Montgomery Clift referees, while providing cutting-edge mental health treatment (aka lobotomy) from the worst mental hospital in the world. Add in the New Orleans lush sweatiness, and the secret of what exactly happened to Katherine's son Sebastian last summer (this is one of those films where actors say the title A LOT), and you have...
Three women, strangers to each other, wordlessly agree to murder a man. Are they insane, or is a silent refusal to explain a rational response when no-one is listening anyway?
Marleen Gorris's 1982 Dutch feminist classic is a truly wonderful film. Pass it on.
What would happen if filmmakers gave the gangsters who carried out state-sponsored murder in Indonesia's dark history the chance to re-enact their crimes? The result is this jaw-dropping documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer (and Indonesian filmmakers, anonymous for their own safety). Unbearable stories with incredible images, shocking brutality with unforgettable surreal beauty. Watch it and weep.
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN vs X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES - two fantastic films about what it means to be a man and being careful what you wish for. What happens when powers aren't super?
It's a man's world in 1950s South America, when Yves Montand is tasked with transporting dangerously explosive nitro-glycerine across rough terrain. It's a job that only the poor and desperate will take on, and not everyone will make it. This is a thrill-a-minute intense journey, with Montand in a vest and neckerchief making this like riding the queerest roller-coaster French cinema can provide. Sacre bleu - this is a blast.
Conwoman meets a chump, and they fall in love, not once but twice, because everything's bigger and better in this dynamite screwball comedy. Barbara Stanwyck pretends to be someone else, but looks exactly the same. Henry Fonda falls over every bit of furniture. They're both smoking hot and funny as hell. All the cast are brilliant. There's a bit with a horse. Honestly, why are you still here? Just watch it already.
Herzog's epic-feeling but actually pretty spare take on one man's mad quest to travel downriver and find the fabled city of gold El Dorado in 16th century South America. And if you're looking for the one man with the maddest mad quest credentials, there is only Klaus Kinski, at his insane best here both on- and off-screen. Come for the history, stay for Kinski as King of the Monkeys. The wildest fo wild rides.
The worst Christmas holiday ever. Teacher John Grant is travelling from his no-horse outback town to Sydney to meet his girlfriend, but drunkenness, gambling and the worst of macho humanity conspire to stop him. A horror movie where Australia is the monster.
Tina is a Swedish border guard with a sixth sense for sniffing out baddies, whether they are drug smugglers or paedophiles. She can't explain her powers until she meets Vore, who has similar talents and a way of making Tina feel seen for the first time in her life. Can these two crazy kids make it work? Part romance (with a once-seen, never-forgotten sex scene), part thriller, part I-genuinely-don't-know-what-this-is, Border takes ...
Not long after the Columbine school massacre, Gus Van Sant and his group of amateur youngsters reimagine a school shooting by playing with time and perspective. What could have been a technical exercise is instead an extremely moving picture of random violence and young lives cut short. A one of a kind.
The master of perviness and his famed one-location, "one-shot" thriller (not really), with James Stewart unravelling the mystery, and John Dall and Farley Granger being one of the outest gay couples in 1950s Hollywood. Follow that nosy camera around the room and marvel.
TV times with James Woods and Debbie Harry in Cronenberg's icky sticky dissection of video nasties, watching the unthinkable and living through your screen. Long live the new flesh.
Listen carefully... Coppola's The Conversation is a masterpiece of misdirection, with Gene Hackman's Harry Caul the essence of paranoid loneliness. Sometimes you really can't believe your ears.
How do you make a feminist film under a repressive theocracy like Iran? It's not a joke to say "very carefully", and Marzieh Meshkini has done just that. Three apparently separate stories of women and girls just trying to live their lives have more in common than we think. It sounds po-faced but it's not - these stories are funny and poignant, with some surrealism and a lot of hope.
Philip Marlowe, hardboiled detective, finds himself in laid-back 1970s California, looking for lost cat, his lost client and his lost friend. There is a plot but that's not the point in Robert Altman's vision of Raymond Chandler, brought to life by a wonderful performance from Elliot Gould.
Marx out of 10? 10 all the way for this Marx Brothers masterpiece. It's got mangled language, pratfalls and puns a-plenty and still has time to say that war is pointless and borders are imaginary. And it's 90 years old. HONK HONK.
The best film EVER about car sex, serial killing, steroid abuse, oil lactation, self-injury and fireman discos? Well it's certainly in the top ten.
Titane is a weirdfest from start to finish, grounded by two amazing performances. French body horror at its best. Formidable.
A man who doesn't want to run is being pursued by a man who doesn't want to chase him.
Sam Peckinpah kills the Hollywood Western stone-dead in this dreamy meditation - when the West and the world are being transformed, what happens to men who can't change?
Kate Winslet gets in with a cult, Harvey Keitel tries to get her out of it through the power of his personality and a fetching red frock. Jane Campion wrangles the not-inconsiderable sexual heat between them. Smokin'.
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