David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat. Cronenberg, the body-horror director who has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood,” has been namechecked by French director Fargeat – along with David Lynch, John Carpenter, and Michael Haneke – as influencing her work. With her latest picture, the giddily gory The Substance, Fargeat makes a convincing case that she’s ready to join, as a peer, the ranks of those she admires. Her film is as nasty as any Cronenberg, as bonkers as any Lynch, and is so horrifically hilarious that I often found myself laughing as I was wincing and looking away from the screen. The Substance is also a razor-sharp feminist satire about youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society.
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Characters describing their dreams is a prominent part of Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest exercise in batshit what-the-fuckery. This salient feature of the picture – which the director cowrote with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou – is so striking because to describe the movie itself is like telling someone upon waking about a series of dreams you had during the previous night. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos, the crown prince of Greek Weird Wave cinema, has crafted a movie that makes his last effort, the befuddling Poor Things, look like a classical Hollywood musical by comparison.
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Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (OUaTiH) is Tarantino’s re-creation of and loving, yet gleefully revisionist, tribute to this fractious period in Hollywood’s history. Without giving too much away, this film is a spiritual cousin to Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. That movie incensed more than a few people with its shockingly gory climax that reimagined the end of World War II.
The same will probably be true for OUaTiH. Tarantino puts his unique spin on the bloody, unspeakable events that closed the 1960s. When creating works of art, I have no need for the artist to feel constrained by the facts when representing real events. A big part of art is reimagining the world in new, different, and interesting ways. A possible exception is documentaries, but even those have exceptions to the rule. Mainly, the purpose Tarantino’s divergence from truth serves in OUaTiH, at least for me, was one of catharsis. Just like in Inglourious Basterds, we get to see good triumph over evil, in the bloodiest, most outrageous way possible…
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