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Director Addison Heimann's Touch Me is a horror film that will likely turn a few heads. Starring Olivia Taylor Dudley, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jordan Gavaris and Marlene Forte, the movie almost defies exploration. It's a tale of trauma, magical aliens and self-help gone awry, wrapped in a nightmarish, technicolor package. Touch Me is visually and topically unique — more than earning its place on any list of unconventional horror movies.

The film centers around Brian — a charismatic, shape-shifting alien with an erotic touch so magical, it can erase all anxiety and pain. When Brian invites Joey and Craig to his mountaintop resort for a wellness retreat, the alien psychosexual therapy devolves into a spiral of addiction, abuse and manipulation that will turn the friends against one another. In this interview with Cbr, director Heimann and actors Dudley, Gavaris, Pucci and Forte share the surrealist and psychological inspiration behind Touch Me,...

New Wave heroes Tears for Fears have announced their first-ever live album, Songs for a Nervous Planet, out everywhere on October 25th. In addition to live classics recorded during the band’s recent tour, there are four new original tracks on Songs for a Nervous Planet, including today’s teaser track, “The Girl That I Call Home.” Pre-order the album here.

Songs for a Nervous Planet is comprised of 22 tracks, with the four new studio cuts kicking off the album. The rest of the live album follows the career-spanning setlist of Tears for Fears’ “Tipping Point Tour Part II,” with the recordings coming from a July 11th, 2023 show at FirstBank Amphitheater in Franklin, Tennessee. In addition to several cuts from the band’s 2022 album The Tipping Point, Songs for a Nervous Planet features live performances of several Tears for Fears classics like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Mad World,...

The Criterion Channel has unveiled its streaming lineup for August 2024, which features an eclectic mix of independent films showcasing the work of auteurs from around the world.

The boutique service will become the exclusive streaming home of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 comedy “Licorice Pizza,” and will celebrate the occasion by adding four more of his films to the channel: “The Master,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” and “Magnolia.” Anderson’s frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman will additionally be celebrated on the streaming service as part of a larger retrospective. Many of the late actor’s most iconic roles, including “Capote” and “Synecdoche, New York,” will be included, along with his sole directorial outing “Jack Goes Boating.”

The channel will also highlight several other prominent filmmakers including Preston Sturges, who helped pioneer the modern rom-com through films like “The Lady Eve” and “The Palm Beach Story,” and prolific Egyptian auteur Youssef Chahine.

The Criterion Channel’s August lineup pays tribute to auteurs of all kinds: directors, actors, and photographers, fictional or otherwise. In a notable act of preservation and advocacy, they’ll stream 20 titles by the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, here introduced by the great Richard Peña. More known (but fun all the same) is a five-title Paul Thomas Anderson series including the exclusive stream of Licorice Pizza, as well as a Philip Seymour Hoffman series that overlaps with Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love (a Criterion Edition this month), and The Master, plus 25th Hour, Love Liza, and his own directing effort Jack Goes Boating. Preston Sturges gets five movies, with Sullivan’s Travels arriving in October.

Theme-wise, a photographer series includes Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Blow-up, Close-Up, and Clouzot’s La prisonnière; “Vacation Noir” features The Lady from Shanghai, Brighton Rock, Kansas City Confidential, Purple Noon, and La piscine. Alongside the aforementioned PTA and Antonioni pictures,...

From Geena Davis and Jamie Lee Curtis, to blaxploitation royalty Pam Grier; Joe Dante and Roland Emmerich, to genre legend Peter Hyams topping the bill – 2024’s Forbidden Worlds Film Festival promises the biggest (and maddest) year yet for genre fans in the South West.

Firing into its third year of taking over arguably Bristol’s best cinema screen – the abandoned IMAX at Bristol Aquarium, Forbidden Worlds has never been one to cater to the masses. It’s a true one-screen wonder of a festival, promising the most unusual and sought-after of cinematic treats; big, mad, weird shit projected large and loud, for three straight days.

For example, while 2024’s edition promises an explosive opening night with a 30th anniversary screening of none other than Keanu Reeves action classic The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down (otherwise known as Speed), look as far as the following day’s line-up and you’ll...

Genre fans, you’re in for a treat: Bristol’s largest repertory genre film festival returns to the city next month. More below:

The Forbidden Worlds Film Festival is back in Bristol for its third consecutive year, with a line up celebrating director Peter Hyams and cinema’s deadliest women.

Running from 16th-19th May in the Bristol Aquarium Cinema, Forbidden Worlds screens repertory fantasy, action, science-fiction and horror films from around the world while celebrating the people that made them.

Check out the festival trailer below:

Should you find yourself Bristol-bound in the near future, the full schedule is available on the festival’s website and includes (but is by no means limited to) screenings of Speed, Stargate and Timecop. If that doesn’t sound enticing, I’m afraid you might have stumbled onto the wrong website.

What’s more, there’s an extra female-focused theme to some of the selections this year,...

Casey Jones has appeared alongside his friends the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in many adaptations of the comic-book series, but the vigilante has never received his own movie. But if Jason Eisener had his way, we’d be watching that Casey Jones movie right now.

Jason Eisener is best known as the director of Hobo with a Shotgun and the recent Kids. vs Aliens, and he took to Twitter to show off a tone reel for a potential Casey Jones movie he pitched to Paramount Pictures five years ago.

“Five years ago I pitched a Casey Jones standalone film to Paramount with Shredders daughter Karai as the heel,” Jason Eisener wrote on Twitter. “The final act saw Casey team up with Raphael who was too look like he stepped out of the 1990 film.” A tone reel typically uses footage from other films to establish tone and atmosphere, and Eisener’s...

Tears for Fears have shared a previously unreleased version of their song “Standing on the Corner of the Third World,” taken off of the upcoming Super Deluxe box set edition of their album Seeds of Love.

This Townhouse Live Jam Session version of the song was recorded in 1988, and is part of the half-hour of never-before-heard, live-in-the-studio performances featured on the new release of the album.

Recalling the sessions that led up to the nine-minute version of the track, Tears for Fears co-founder Roland Orzabal says: “We got Oleta in...

Tears for Fears have shared the previously unreleased “Townhouse live jam” version of their hit single “Woman in Chains,” taken from the band’s upcoming five-disc reissue for their 1989 album The Seeds of Love.

The unearthed spin on the track features gospel singer Oleta Adams, who also guested on the Seeds of Love version. During the London’s Townhouse studio jam session, the band played loose yet faithful renditions of the Seeds of Love tracks.

“We got Oleta in and we had Manu Katche on drums and Pino Palladino on bass and started playing live,...

Tears for Fears have shared the previously unreleased “Rhythm of Life,” the first offering from their upcoming Seeds of Love box set.

The demo was recorded by frontman Roland Orzabal and keyboardist Nicky Holland in 1986, but the track didn’t make it onto the 1989 album. Instead, Orzabal gave it to singer Oleta Adams — who sings on the opening track “Woman in Chains” — for her 1990 album Circle of One, which he produced.

“Climbin’ every mountain, always killing time/Count the cost as days go by,” he sings over a steady groove.

Tears for Fears’ third album, 1989’s The Seeds of Love — which contained the hits “Sowing the Seeds of Love” and “Woman in Chains” — will be expanded into a five-disc box set this fall. The record was one of the band’s most ambitious studio outings, as it followed up their mega-selling Songs From the Big Chair — it reportedly cost more than £1 million to make.

The box set will feature the original album, remastered, singles and B-sides, alternate mixes, demos and outtakes. Twenty-two of the tracks are previously unreleased. There will...

To mark the release of the restoration of The Nun, out now, we’ve been given a Blu-ray bundle including The Nun, The Essential Godard Collection, La Prisonnière, Belle de Jour and Lola to give away.

In the Xviii century, Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina) is locked in a convent against her will. She finds for a while some comfort with the Mother Superior, but then she dies and is replaced by a sadistic woman than cannot stop blaming and punishing Suzanne. The young lady gets the right to move to another convent, however, she remains determined to recover her freedom.

Jacques Rivette (1928 – 2016) was a French film director and film critic, known for his contributions to the French New Wave and the influential magazine (dubbed the ‘instrument of combat’ of the New Wave) Cahiers du Cinéma, of which he was editor throughout the first half of the 1960s. Extremely prolific throughout his career,...

I.Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (1964) is one of the most tantalizing unfinished projects in cinema history. If completed, it would have told a story of extreme jealousy and obsession. The plot is simple—a hotel owner, Marcel (Serge Reggiani), begins to suffer from nightmarish visions in which his young wife Odette (Romy Schneider) appears in various lascivious poses and sometimes erotically interacts with another man. Marcel gradually descends into madness and may, in the end, be driven to kill his wife. Generously backed by Columbia (via the French production company Orsay Films), Clouzot shot in black and white as well as in color, employing three separate film crews, no less than 12 cameras, and a large number of technicians and film craftsmen, including some of the most established industry names of the time. For six months, three cameramen—Claude Renoir, Armand Thirard and Andréas Winding—shot seemingly endless studio tests and,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (2009) is showing from February 2 - March 4, 2018 in many countries around the world.“Memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.”—Marguerite Duras With Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea both reconstruct and describe the production of the titular unfinished 1964 film, presenting their film as at once an op-art experiment and a traditional documentary of a failed production. At its center, however, is a preoccupation with the notion of the historical fragment and the viewer’s attribution of meaning and value to the fragment. This attribution is largely the result of a lack, as Lacan put it, experienced by both the fragment and viewer that can never be satisfied. The fragment signifies its own symbolic desire to be a part of a whole and the viewer’s symbolic desire for that whole.

Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.

Filmmaker maudit?...

Clouzot and Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...

Filmmakers -- especially French ones, and especially those working before the 50s -- are often overly romanticized amongst cinephiles. We love a great film, but we really love the underlying legends and myths of the artist and the creative process, struggling and screaming and clawing to get each film made, centralized on a whirligig of backstabbing, betrayal, and romance. Failed projects, lusty affairs, bouts with depression, creative absences, controversial ideologies, and tragic deaths: it's the stuff that makes the singular genius of the director all the more untouchable; all the more storied. Enter, then, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the 'French Hitchcock' - perhaps the most improbable canonized auteur of them all. The Tiff Bell Lightbox in Toronto won't be spotlighting him with an 'art' exhibition ala Fellini's photo show last summer, but they will be giving his modestly sized filmography a run-through from mid-October to November 29. Unpretentiously titled The Wages of Fear...

'Dostoevskian' French actor with an aura of tormented youth

With his emaciated but hypnotically handsome face and lithe body, the French actor Laurent Terzieff, who has died of respiratory infection aged 75, graced the stage and films for more than half a century. There was always an aura of tormented youth about Terzieff which he carried into the classic roles of his maturity such as Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV (1989) and Shakespeare's Richard II (1991). His perfect diction and rhythmic precision made his rendering of Jean Cocteau's narration of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex in Bob Wilson's production at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1996 particularly exciting.

Terzieff's special talents were used by many of the great theatre producers of the day: Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Brook, Roger Planchon, Maurice Garrel, Roger Blin and André Barsacq. He also directed dozens of plays, many at the Théâtre du Lucernaire in Montparnasse. Paradoxically, given his tormented persona as an actor,...