David Cronenberg, 1977, Canada, 91 min

This film is part of Bookmarked Cinema, in collaboration with Deep Vellum Books. We will also be selling the book Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin which pairs perfectly with this film!

Picking up where the taboo-busting SHIVERS left off, RABID is the next-level iteration of Cronenberg’s obsession with sexual body violence in the form of a late nite creature feature. After a motorcycle accident, former adult film star Marilyn Chambers wakes up in a hospital with new skin and a new appetite. As the city of Montréal is transformed into an incubator for gunk-spewing vampires, the ghostly Chambers finds herself at war with her body and the world. This is a young Cronenberg firing on all cylinders. Featuring a focused and intense performance from Chambers, clever statements on vanity and greed, and a grotesque lil’ beastie who looks like a penis with teeth, RABID is a high-water mark in lysergic horror. This includes the show-stopping scene that involves a machine gun and Santa Claus.

Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976, Iran, 98 min

This film is part of Bookmarked Cinema, in collaboration with Deep Vellum Books. We will also be selling the book Rituals of Restlessness by Yaghoub Yadali which pairs perfectly with this film!

This rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds in an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently-deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a stunningly subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.

Oliver Assayas, 2002, France, 122 min

This film is part of Bookmarked Cinema, in collaboration with Deep Vellum Books. We will also be selling the book Freeway by Jorge Enrique Lage which pairs perfectly with this film!

“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning Demonlover, a postmodern neonoir thriller and media critique in which nothing—not even the film itself—is what it appears to be. Nielsen plays Diane de Monx, a Volf Corporation executive turned spy for rival Mangatronics in the companies’ battle over the lucrative market of Internet adult animation. But Diane may not be the only player at Volf with a hidden agenda: both romantic interest Hervé (Charles Berling) and office enemy Elise (Chloë Sevigny) seem to know her secret and can easily use it against her for their own purposes. As the stakes grow higher and Diane ventures into deadlier territory, Assayas explores the connections between multinational businesses and extreme underground media as well as the many ways 21^st-century reality increasingly resembles violent, disorienting fiction.

Luchino Visconti, 1957, Italy, 101 min

This film is part of Bookmarked Cinema, in collaboration with Deep Vellum Books. We will also be selling the book Diary of A Film by Niven Govinden which pairs perfectly with this film!

Marcello Mastroianni, as a lonely city transplant, and Maria Schell, as a sheltered girl haunted by a lover’s promise, meet by chance on a canal bridge and begin a tentative romance that quickly entangles them in a web of longing and self-delusion. Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche, an exquisite adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “White Nights,” translates this romantic, shattering tale of two restless souls into a ravishing black-and-white dream.