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24

Love it. Currently my number two fave of the year. Yann Gonzalez gives us a beautiful love letter to giallo cinema and like Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let the Corpses Tan), he captures the look and vibe of the genre and era perfectly. Bravo!

Vanessa Paradis is wonderful and has the perfect face for this film.

M83's score is beautifully melodic. And where did cinematographer Simon Beaufils come from? There's been incredibly shot films this year but this one takes the cake for me. And here I go again but must point out the to-die-for images that are only possible by capturing on celluloid.
Lush 35mm shot in Techniscope. There's some 16mm in there as well.

16 mm (Kodak…

2

Formally an almost entirely unreconstructed modern giallo, perfectly delivering every scuzzy beat and baffling narrative twist, but so suffused with lust and longing that it achieves this constant hypnodrone eroticism. Stay for the credits.

2

HOMO
CIDAL

3

“was i a good fag?”

26

Damn I really loved this! A gay giallo, what’s not to love right? I was incredibly drawn into the story...like so drawn in that I gave my husband my signature eye roll when he asked a question about what was happening and immediately hated the person who sent me a text before I even know who they were. I was invested, k?

And I mean, how could I not be. It’s a delightful modern take on one of my favorite genres of film with some serious homages to the classics, especially Argento. The lighting is full of those beautiful red and blue hues. Plus, y’all this movie is Gay®. Gay gay gay gay gay. GAY. And yet, surprisingly tame in…

6

French queer giallo that drifts into fantastique territory and hands down contains exactly what that empty husk of a movie I watched before this (strange color of your blah blah) lacks so desperately—emotion. Knife + Heart is such an apt title and I’m estatic that there’s finally a contemporary giallo that isn’t focused on a checklist of every trope imaginable or samples of second tier giallo needle drops. Sure... there’s homages in this but nothing about this feels smug. 

I loved where this went with the second act, delving into the fantastique elements way more than I imagined it would—unsettling me in a positive way with just enough dreamy atmos to sweep me away in the process... just long enough to…

Review by Liz ★★★★½ Liked

Surprisingly tender, not just because of its central love story, but for how Gonzalez uses 's gay porn boom as a means to explore cinema's ability to allow marginalized people to see and recreate idealized versions of their own lives on screen.

As much as I like all of the more overt genre elements -- especially the heavily eroticized death sequences and the mid-film detour into the fantastique -- it's the way that Gonzalez is able to work them into an evocation of the era that never feels beholden to the past that makes this resonate so well with me.

(I always hate focusing on references, but I kind of really loved seeing explicit nods to Diabolical Dr. Z, New York Ripper, NYC Inferno, and real-life figures like Anne-Marie Tensi and François About throughout this)

1

From what I had heard of this before, I was expecting something with tenderness, warmth, kindness to it.

This is icy neon hell. This is tragedy and agony, broken hearts and poisonous rage.

There are a few stylistic choices I would have forgone myself, such as the flashback sequences' color palette and segues, the sterile white final scenes and the unrepentantly toxic lead character both infuse this with the right tone: misery and horror, a myth of release. This is a blend of giallo and slasher, of pornographic setting and noir aspirations, of raw fantasy and disturbing reality.

There is no redemption here; only conclusion. Nothing in this suggests that the horrors we see are okay, are justified, are reasonable.…

1

AFI 2018: film #5

“yesterday we came, tomorrow we die”

part gritty realism, part dreamy fantasy, but all together really really gay. the mystery is more interesting than i thought it would be, and there are some beautifully nasty moments that stand out. overall an interesting way to spend an afternoon

7

was skeptical going in but this is the real deal - despite general dicklessness theres a charged sweetness to all the cum'n'tanlines hookups & our homo-artcore directrix vanessa paradis has a real tragic sense of humor & cynical intelligence i didnt expect from someone i last saw in YOGA HOSERS. introducing her bottom-out drunk & dumped by her gf over a payphone had me locked in right out the gate! love how they offset the horny sex murders & prerequisite red/blue neon synth with some of the supernatural fairy tale/mystery elements from so many messy 70s euro-horrors everybody seems to forget about now. Watch This Gay Giallo Now!!

7

Has a special place in my heart for being the first queer movie I so viscerally connected with and, to this day, remains firmly at the top. In hyper-stylizing the grimier aspects of queer media that I normally find fairly frivolous it manages to evoke a feeling of arousal, revulsion, and, most unusual of all, immaculacy, that last aspect the one that transforms what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill erotic horror flick into something truly sublime. Editing, audio design, costuming, etc. are all clearly done with a purpose besides mere aestheticism, a singular purpose that marries the genre trappings with the core motif of the film: that of the invisibility of queerness within ̶q̶u̶e̶e̶r̶ love.

Within the world of Knife+Heart…

Review by Vera Drew ★★★★★ Liked

Heavenly. Like Fellini made Cruising into a giallo. Loved the characters, the humor, the colors, the cinematography, Spunk and the Land Alone, this credit sequence 😭 gorgeous fuckin film. I could watch women kiss each other and boys fuck one another until I die. And I probably will.