At times it can seem that cinema, at least its American variant, inhabits a prolonged adolescence in which images of sex are at once omnipresent and puerile, in a “can’t look too close but can’t look away” manner. But why? Why should sex be any harder to credit in movies than murder?
FEATURES: Cinema’s Sex Acts; Ten Thousand Waves; Male Beauty and the Erotics of Intimacy; Under the Skin; plus Festival Reports, Page Views, and more…
Mark Fisher reviews Steve McQueen’s bleak, blank tale of New York addiction and emptiness, starring Michael Fassbender, Shame.
The 40th annual New Directors/New Films festival at the Museum of Modern Art and Film Society at Lincoln Center (March 23–April 3) brought together a pair of features from Egypt, telling tales of two cities and two sexes on the edge of a volcano.