Ioncinema

She was pulled from obscurity (or non-retirement since her last feature was 2013’s Abuse of Weakness) when Saïd Ben Saïd optioned the rights to 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts and then proposed it French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, and as...

The Secret Life of Bees: Solaguren’s Warm Debut Explores the Communal Dictation of Gender Identity Our relationship to our gender and sexual identities is so overwhelmingly dictated in our formative years by the binary certitudes of family and culture it’s...

Love in the Blood: Beau Resurrects Russian Vampire Clan in Eccentric Genre Throwback Chuck Palahniuk wrote it best, referencing an ‘old saying’ in his 1996 novel Fight Club regarding how ‘you always kill the one you love.’ It’s certainly the...

After being feted on the Lido (winner of the Director’s Award in the Giornate degli Autori section – we were there) and being showcased at TIFF, Ariane Louis-Seize returned to her home turf for the presentation of her award-winning feature...

Sentimental Succubus: Louis-Seize Finds Love is All Consuming in Vampire Rom-Com “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” read the tagline for the quintessential 1970 romantic drama Love Story, in which a young man and woman from different walks...

The Good Pole: Holland’s Humanitarian Drama a Steady Drizzle of Misery Porn The difference between an exploitation vs. a social issue film can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, sometimes straying into both territories, usually depending on the agenda of its...

Agnes of God: Franz & Fiala’s Bleak Portrait of Women & Madness “A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” wrote Ray Bradbury in one of his stories from Long After Midnight (1976), as succinct a...

Bounds of Boundaries: Lanthimos Entertains Himself with Bizarre Triptych It’s safe to say Yorgos Lanthimos has undoubtedly entered the oblivious, self-indulgent era of his career with his latest, Kinds of Kindness, recycling a large number of his Poor Things (2023)...

Grandma Scamma: Margolin Steals a Win with Squibb Although there’s a prodigious sub-genre of kooky comedies featuring elderly resilient women (though more often in European cinema), few of them steer clear of screwball conceits which often seem cheap or cheesy....

The passing of the torch was confirmed around Cannes, and rather than what might have been an August shoot, Les Films de Pierre producer Marie-Ange Luciani and filmmaker Robin Campillo are moving full steam ahead on Enzo – the project...