by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Love Lies Bleeding | 2024
Love Lies Bleeding is perhaps the horniest, most aesthetically electrifying film I've seen in a multiplex in very long time. It's a sweaty, sweltering, heady mix of queer eroticism, crime thriller, magical realism, and dark comedy that feels genuinely rebellious in a way films rarely do anymore.
In her 2008 essay "Chungking Express: Electric Youth" (included as an extra in the booklet of the Criterion Blu-Ray), critic Amy Taubin compares Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express to Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1966 film, Masculin Feminin. It's a perceptive parallel, acknowledging both films as quintessential products of their time in depicting youthful romance and disaffection.