REVIEW: Un couteau dans le coeur [Knife+Heart] [2018]

She’s playing with real life. Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis) has ruined her love. What she’s done to push Loïs (Kate Moran) away is unknown, but her desperation ensures we know she was dumped and not the dumper. Whatever happened hasn’t soured their relationship completely, however. Loïs still cares enough about Anne as a person and especially as an artist to remain editor on her cheaply produced gay porn films utilizing the same loyal troupe of actors—her eye forever lingering on Anne’s smile whenever it’s caught on-camera before François (Bertrand Mandico)…

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REVIEW: Les rencontres d’après minuit [You and the Night] [2013]

“Always follow the clues in dreams” Everyone wants to describe Yann Gonzalez‘s films as kinky escapades of campy, colorful eroticism rather than mention what lies beneath that excitingly daring sheen: a profound sense of sadness. It’s a powerful longing for acceptance and love, a desire for more than our minds believe possible. The orgy constructed at the center of his feature length debut Les rencontres d’après minuit [You and the Night] isn’t therefore about sex or even pleasure. Instead it serves as a gateway to memory and a hopeful expression…

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REVIEW: Let My People Go! [2011]

“My life is one bad Jewish joke” For his first feature length film, writer/director Mikael Buch has decided upon an extremely over-the-top romantic farce about a young homosexual Jewish man coming home to France from Finland after a lovers’ spat. It all plays out during Passover with a not-so-subtle aside about the holiday prayer speaking on the Exodus from Egypt and the coalescing of a people under the leadership of Moses. As Ézechiel the Rabbi (Michaël Abiteboul) says towards the end of the aptly named Let My People Go!, the…

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