Gattaca (1997) | Dir. Andrew Niccol

Of Freaks and Men (1998) | dir. Alexei Balabanov

When evil triumphs, humour turns black. Glimpses of turn-of-the-century porn has an uncomfortable, humiliating look to it. Balabanov massages human nature's ugly heart. The film is so original and startling, it appears playful, when really it concerns an abuse of power that feeds off trust and decency, perverting both.

The film is shot as a pastiche of silent cinema, without Chaplin's famous fast motion. In old St Petersburg the bourgeoisie live innocent and privileged lives, while in the basement of an abandoned building tight-lipped Johan (Sergei Makovetsky), with his smirking, sinister sidekick (Victor Sukhorukov), organises nude spanking sessions

which are photographed and sold to sado-masochistic postcard collectors, when not purloined by their naughty maids.

There are moments in this deliciously subversive film when you suspect Alexei Balabanov is being satirical and those scenes of pornographers taking over the grand houses, only to corrupt them with their nasty habits, refer to organised crime's stranglehold on the Russian economy, not to mention the state of the nation.

The Virgin Suicides (1999) | dir. Sofia Coppola | USA

Cinematography by Edward Lachman

Amélie | dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet | 2001

DoP: Bruno Delbonnel

Konstantin Khabenskiy

Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range, that is dizzyingly sensual. Movies generally work you up to expect the sensual intensities, but here you may be pulled into a high without warning. Violence erupts crazily, too, the way it does in life – so unexpectedly fast that you can’t believe it, and over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psychs you up to accept everything it shows you. And since the story deepens as it goes along, you’re likely to be openmouthed, trying to rethink what you’ve seen. Its about American life here and now, and it doesn’t look like an American movie, or feel like one. What Scorsese has done with the experience of growing up in New York’s Little Italy has a thicker-textured rot and violence than we have ever had in any American movie, and a riper since of evil.

The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial; it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. “Mean Streets” never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience; rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them. Every character, every sound, is rooted in those streets. The back-and-forth talk isn’t little-people empty-funny; it’s a tangle of jeering and joshing, of mutual goading and nerves getting frayed. These boys understand each other too well. No other American gangster-milieu film has had this element of personal obsession; there has never before been a gangster film in which you felt that the director himself was saying “This is my story.” We’re so affected because we know in our bones that Scorsese has walked these streets and has felt what his characters feel. He knows how crime is natural to them.

Scorsese could make poetic drama, rather than melodrama laced with decadence, out of the schlock of shabby experience because he didn’t have to “dive below the polite level, to something nearer to the common life” but had to do something much tougher- descend into himself and bring up what neither he nor anyone else could have known was there. Though he must have suspected. This is a blood thriller in the truest sense.

Pauline Kael

SONG of the DAY _ Nightclubbing - Iggy Pop - from “The Idiot” (1977)

Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing We’re what’s happening Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing We’re an ice machine We see people, brand new people They’re something to see Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing Oh isn’t it wild? Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing We’re walking through town Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing We walk like a ghost We learn dances, brand new dances Like the nuclear bomb When we’re nightclubbing, bright-white clubbing Oh isn’t it wild

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don’t see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.

Guillermo del Toro - Quotes (via 4eternal-life)

The Virgin Suicides (1999) | dir. Sofia Coppola | USA

Cinematography by Edward Lachman

Amélie | dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet | 2001

DoP: Bruno Delbonnel

Withnail & I (1987) | dir. Bruce Robinson

The film is a testament to the potency and sadness of friendship and the compromises required for the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

“To pronounce oneself immune to the charms of Withnail & I is to declare oneself a philistine, a Puritan and a snob.” - Kevin Jackson, 2004

At the end of Bruce Robinson’s much-loved journey through the dying months of the 1960s, Withnail (Richard E. Grant) walks Marwood ( Paul McGann ) through Regent’s Park on the way to the station. As his friend vanishes from his life, Withnail stands in the rain and quotes one of Hamlet’s soliloquies to the watching wolves.

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s, Robinson’s comedy of bad manners sees two struggling twentysomething actors – flamboyant, melancholic narcissist Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and his unnamed, unassuming friend (Paul McGann) – pursue booze, recreation, work and the meaning of life in Camden Town and the Lake District. Based on Robinson’s own experiences, this labour of love achieved cult status on the strength of its endlessly quotable dialogue and brilliantly eccentric performances (notably Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Monty and Ralph Brown’s Danny the dealer). The beautifully sodden photography and a cannily evocative pop soundtrack help fix the mood. The script references Bruce Robinson’s own acting work in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968).