Sofia Boutella

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

While the chronological approach that Criterion took in their Essential Fellini box set meant that the start was less than smooth, Matt’s definitely finding that the films improve a lot over time – and after I Vitelloni, La Strada is a worthy addition to any film collection, not least because of Giulietta Masina’s wonderful performance as Gelsomina.

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I am going to go out on a limb and say that even those viewers who say they like Gaspar Noé’s movies don’t find them easy to sit through. It’s hard to like any of his movies in the conventional feel-good sense. Nobody likes von Trier that way, either. And while von Trier is on the darker side of the emotional cineastic spectrum, Noé can be almost maniacally, forcefully happy by way of a drug-induced high for a short time, but his movies, sooner rather than later, always tip over into loss and despair. Irreversible has that unflinching and seemingly endless rape scene, Enter the Void is about a guy overdosing and then floating above Tokyo, visiting his sister and other people. Love is about a three-way relationship breaking apart, which is almost conventional for Noé. All of them, however, have in common their pretty radical storytelling, floating unsteady camera, flickering primary colors, and their unapologetic leaps into nudity and/or violence.