100/100

Thought Abel Ferrara couldn't rise above the intermingling sensuality and horror of New Rose Hotel, but his delicate, mournful portrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini captures the essence of a figure in a way not seen since...I don't know....Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters? Its dreamy mixture of poetry, interviews, conversation, and unseen material is evoked through tranquil editing and sold by Willem Dafoe's masterful performance. It concludes before any sense of satisfaction, only fitting considering the void left after his death. Just spectacular.

73/100

*rings doorbell*

*neighbor opens door*

Neighbor: "Yes?"

Me: "DO YOU KNOW THE GOOD WORKS OF FERRARA?!?"

Neighbor: "What?"

Me: "KING OF NEW YORK. THE BLACKOUT. NEW ROSE HOTEL. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM?!?!"

*door slams*

99

"Time's up... Do it - or forever wish you had."

A story of romance smothered, deceived, and reminisced. Stream of consciousness as a continual image-to-image journey, tresing through sunsets, surveillance footage and memories from various angles, perspectives, spaces. Loss is *the* defining gateway, and it affects all who wander within its grasp. Earth-shattering in its form, content, and feeling. Ferrara creates a stew of compositions melding and coalescing, their meaning heightened in sensation while also swooning into incoherent, unearthly surges of representation. A fearless masterpiece which makes almost every other film in the 1990s feel like child's play.

84/100

A home clustered with history, feuds, relationships, beliefs. Daytime soon fades into a seemingly eternal night, and it is in the shadow where Ferrara begins to play with flashback; time unknowingly revitalized and depicted. Character details illuminate and cower as swiftly as their present selves wander the world; frustrated criminals searching each corner for their own angel of death. And while The Funeral protrays an entire family structure lost in grief but employed in loss, Ferrara never molds its figures to be anything other than pieces in an organization.

Alternate title: The House of Weeping Women.

72/100

Vampirism revolving around a lack of structure and routine. New York City is seen as a connecting station between elegant, modern interiors; souls on the street either in ing or in crumbling stasis. Ferrara stages 'addiction' as the epitome of reactionary takeovers, for no one truly understands until they're under the very same spell. Its black & white photography - not even succumbing to the typical trope of showcasing bright red blood as anomaly - enriches the horror but allows for haunting clarity, plunging this grungy, shaken tale into a more inevitable realm. Terror on the avenue.

87/100

Grainy confessions, crystal clear reenactments of torment, abuse, purgation. Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game collapses reality into video, rehearsal into the final take, method acting into actual endangerment. A filmmaker's Heaven, a filmmaker's Hell, one and the same. Harvey Keitel and Madonna are in-fucking-credible, truthful and honest to a point where each frame becomes troubling, sinister, disquieting. One of the Great films about Hollywood.