Erotic Stagnancy: Steigerwalt’s Depthless Approach of a Italian Porn Heyday
There’s a formidably compelling subject matter at the heart of Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s sophomore film Diva Futura, which recuperates the shifting social mores of Italian culture through the wild success of the titular pornography studio established by Riccardo Schicchi. Curating a handful of celebrity personas through his work, two of whom would go on to pursue political careers, this nostalgia tinged approach takes a look at a progressive swing in the country’s conservative rhetoric of the 1990s before the internet changed the game of the industry indefinitely. But this presentation is not the film which succeeds in capturing the movement or its participants.… Read the rest
Kudos to Todd Phillips for forcing US audiences to be confronted with the intriguing subtitle for his highly anticipated sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, a psychiatric term from 19th century French psychiatrist Charles Lasegue, which means ‘madness of two.’ But the shared delirium implied of the toxic romance at the heart of the narrative really applies to anyone who’s impressed by this interminably vacuous sequel to Phillip’s 2019 Joker, which surprisingly won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and took home a Best Actor Academy Award for Joaquin Phoenix.… 
Adapted from a novel by Jim Croce, Harvest is Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s third feature narrative, and, unfortunately, also her least effective. Described as the director’s take on the Western genre which aims to depict “the trauma of modernity,” it instead plays like a glacially paced bit of folk horror as concerns an unnamed time and place where an obscure farming community has been deemed an obsolete outpost to its money hungry landowners. While an aggressive edit of about thirty minutes from its two-hour plus run time might make its endlessly repetitive interactions feel a bit less languorous, a lack of tension and characterization robs this moral fable from conjuring any real emotional impact.… 
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her seminal essay 
