COMA looks to face an uncertain future
by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer
In Coma, director Bertrand Bonello has managed to capture the information age’s endemic paralysis: the overwhelming options leading to deadlock.
Brooklyn Horror Fest 2023: KILL YOUR LOVER, RED ROOMS, CANNIBAL MUCKBANG, STOPMOTION, and more
by Tori Potenza, Staff Writer
Reviews from the 2023 Brooklyn Horror Fest!
Zombi Child
Written and directed by Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Louise Labeque, Wislanda Louimat and Katiana Milfort
Running time: 1 hour and 43 minutes
by Ryan Smillie
“When the anthropologists appear, the Gods depart.”-purported Haitian proverb
In 1789, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), a group of free blacks appealed to the Declaration’s assertion that all men were free and equal to demand the right to vote. The French colonial government denied the appeal and violently crushed a brief insurgency against the decision. In return, the population of African and African-descended slaves, who outnumbered the European colonists nearly ten to one, launched a revolt that ended with the abolition of slavery, the expulsion of the French colonial government, and the independence of Haiti.
Read MoreThe Violence of Decadence in Nocturama
by Andreas Petrossiants
If Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (2014) is a bourgeois wet dream drowned in champagne, acid tabs, and couture, then his latest, Nocturama, is instead a metropolitan nightmare, populated by (militant) millennials to the tune of sub-bass electronic music and Chief Keef. His displacement of the “real” in both films — the life of a tortured celebrity/mythical figure in the former, and the tragically familiar coordinated violence of our present moment in the latter — are composed in a similar aesthetic: sexy, elegant, and meticulously choreographed.
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