Quote:
Karsh, 50, is a prominent businessman. Inconsolable since the death of his wife, he invents GraveTech, revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor their dear departed in their shrouds. One night, multiple graves, including that of Karsh’s wife, are desecrated. Karsh sets out to track down the perpetrators.

The.Shrouds.2024.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 59 min
Size: 	2.96 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 080 kb/s
BPP: 	0.218
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EA7A7DC07EC58DD/The.Shrouds.2024.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French

The post David Cronenberg – The Shrouds (2024) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
No stranger to the sensual and medical contours of the body, horror icon David Cronenberg turns to 18th-century wax cadavers as his new muses for this poetic short. Sonically caressed by a chorus of pleasurable sighs, these anatomical Venuses are both alluring and uncanny in their voluptuousness.

Four.Unloved.Women.Adrift.on.a.Purposeless.Sea.Experience.the.Ecstasy.of.Dissection.2023.2160p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.265-MADSKY.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	3mn 55s
Size:	419 MiB
Video
Codec:	h265
Resolution:	3840x2080
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	30.000 fps
Bit rate:	14.7 Mb/s
Audio
zxx 2.0ch E-AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A5839D863082548/Four.Unloved.Women.Adrift.on.a.Purposeless.Sea.Experience.the.Ecstasy.of.Dissection.2023.2160p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.265-MADSKY.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:English

The post David Cronenberg – Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (2023) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” opens with a throat- slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant.

The slashing need not immediately concern us. The teenage girl who hemorrhages is raced to a hospital and dies in childbirth in the arms of a midwife named Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts). Fiercely determined to protect the helpless surviving infant, she uses her Russian-born mother and uncle (Sinead Cusack and Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate the dead girl’s diary, and it leads her to a restaurant run by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the head of the mafia family. Her uncle begs her to go nowhere near that world.

Semyon has a vile son named Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and a violent but loyal driver and bodyguard, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). And the gears of the story shift into place when the diary, the midwife and the crime family become interlocked.

“Eastern Promises” is no ordinary crime thriller, just as Cronenberg is no ordinary director. Beginning with low-rent horror films in the 1970s, because he could get them financed, Cronenberg has moved film by film into the top rank of directors, and here he wisely reunites with Mortensen, star of their “A History of Violence” (2005). No, Mortensen is not Russian, but don’t even think about the problem of an accent; he digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first.

Naomi Watts, playing an Anglicized second-generation immigrant, has no idea at first what she has gotten herself into, and why the diary is of vital importance to these people. All she cares about is the baby, but she learns fast that the baby’s life and her own are both at great risk. In fact, her entry into that world has driven a wedge into it that sets everybody at odds and challenges long-held assumptions.

The script is by Steven Knight, author of the powerful “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), about a black market in body parts. Set in London, it had scarcely a native-born Londoner in it. He’s fascinated by the worlds within the London world. Here, too. His lines of morality are more murkily drawn here, as allegiances and loyalties shift, and old emotions turn out to be forgotten but not dead.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is the key player, trusted by Semyon. We are reminded of Don Corleone’s trust in an outsider, Tom Hagen, over his own sons, Sonny and Fredo. Here Semyon depends on Nikolai more than Kirill, who has an ugly streak that sometimes interferes with the orderly conduct of business. Anna (Watts) senses she can trust Nikolai, too, even though it is established early that this tattooed warrior is capable of astonishing violence. At a time when movie “fight scenes” are as routine as the dances in musicals, Nikolai engages in a fight in this film that sets the same kind of standard that “The French Connection” set for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark.

Cronenberg has said he’s not interested in crime stories as themselves. “I was watching ‘Miami Vice’ the other night,” he told Adam Nayman of Toronto’s Eye Weekly, “and I realized I’m not interested in the mechanics of the mob, but criminality and people who live in a state of perpetual transgression — that is interesting to me.”

And to me as well. What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world. Their story puts their characters to a test: They can be true to their job descriptions within a hermetically sealed world where everyone shares the same values and expectations, and where outsiders are by definition the prey. But what happens when their cocoon is broached? Do they still possess fugitive feelings instilled by a long-forgotten babushka? And what if they do?

“Just don’t give the plot away,” Cronenberg begged in that interview. He is correct that it would be fatal, because this is not a movie of what or how, but of why. And for a long time you don’t see the why coming. It’s that way with stories about plausible human beings, which is why I prefer them to stories about characters who are simply elements in fiction. There was a big surprise in “A History of Violence” that pretty much everybody entering the theater already knew. But “Eastern Promises” had its world premiere Saturday at the Toronto Film Festival and opens today in major North American markets; I have studied its trailer, and it doesn’t give away a hint of its central business.

So let’s leave it that way and simply regard the performances. I write little about casting directors, because I can’t know what really goes on, and of course directors make the final choice for key roles. But whatever Deirdre Bowen and Nina Gold had to do with the choices in this movie, including what might seem the unlikely choice of Mortensen, was pitch-perfect. The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

2.70GB | 1h 40m | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E5D9406D6F18475/David_Cronenberg_-_(2007)_Eastern_Promises.mkv

Language(s):English,Russian,Turkish,Ukrainian,Urdu
Subtitles:English

The post David Cronenberg – Eastern Promises (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin, an investigator from the National Organ Registry, obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed. Their mission – to use Saul’s notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.

2.41GB | 1h 47m | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/16ECCE26C35852E/Crimes_of_the_Future.2022.BDRip.AVC.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, English SDH, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian

The post David Cronenberg – Crimes of the Future (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In 1960s China, French diplomat Rene Gallimard falls in love with an opera singer, Song Liling – but Song is not at all who Gallimard thinks.

Quote:
René Gallimard, an accountant at the French Embassy in China circa 1967, is invited to a party at the Swedish Embassy where he sees a performance of highlights from Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly, performed by a Chinese ensemble led by the stunning star of the Beijing opera, Song Liling. René tells the beautiful chanteuse that he was captivated by her performance as the Japanese woman who kills herself when she is abandoned by her lover, a United States Naval officer. Song counters that it comes as no surprise that he likes it since the submissive Oriental woman is a typical Western male fantasy. Utterly fascinated with Song’s beauty and wit, René pursues her recklessly, flagrantly ignorant of his marriage and position. Song is hesitant at first to submit to René’s advances, claiming modesty and a certain respect for Chinese custom but soon capitulates to René’s heated desire, albeit on her own terms — sexually and emotionally. Soon, Song tells René that she is pregnant and must return to her village until she the child is three months old, an ancient Chinese custom. Unbeknownst to René, Song is a spy for the Communist Party and has been milking him for sensitive political information regarding Vietnam. Song returns to René with their son, but only just before she is sent to a labor camp for being an artist, which is now, despite her work for the government, a criminal occupation under the new strictures of the Cultural Revolution.

Due to his rash errors in judgment and the changing political climate in Asia in 1968, René loses his position and returns to France to eke out a meager living. His wife and all of his important colleagues have abandoned him and he lives in a small flat, serving himself tea and wallowing in the memories he has of China. His memories are complicated by the May 1968 revolts in Paris, a reminder of the revolution that led to so much personal pain for him in China. Miraculously, Song returns to René in Paris and convinces him to take a job as a diplomatic courier where he might once again have access to crucial secrets. Song tells René that he must allow her to give government secrets to the Chinese in order to get back their son. Soon, René is arrested on counts of espionage. During René’s trial, the most damning testimony is given by what gives new meaning to the term “surprise witness”: Song, revealed to be a man.

Regardless of the fact that the film was adapted from a major, award-winning play and had a relatively high budget for a Cronenberg film (he was able, for the first time, to film outside of North America in locations as far-flung as The Great Wall of China, Budapest, and Paris), the film tanked in a major way at the box office at the end of 1993. For this, one can probably blame Warner Bros., who clearly had no idea how to market this film, but one can blame equally a viewing public whose response to two men kissing on screen (even if they are supposed to think one of them is a woman) is squeamish at best, and whose appetite for cross-dressing surprises, if it existed at all, was probably sated by Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game a year earlier. Since then, the film virtually has vanished from public memory and video store shelves, available only as a pan-and-scan videotape release and featureless laserdisc.

Viewing the credits, the film doesn’t seem like a Cronenberg “auteur piece.” The author of the original play, David Henry Hwang, is not only the screenwriter, but also a producer. It is likely that Hwang hand picked Cronenberg to direct this work, but it is also likely that he wasn’t the first choice. What’s evident from watching the film, however, is that Cronenberg either made significant alterations to the script or convinced Hwang, in his adaptation from play to screenplay, to make alterations that would make the material more cinematic and less theatrical.

The original play is a dense, narratively complex work that explores issues of authenticity, cultural stereotyping and imperialism, and gender — all of which are no doubt addressed in dozens of English majors’ honors theses somewhere — but is constructed as a chamber piece for a handful of actors. Cronenberg keeps the intimacy of the play but smoothes out the narrative into linear thread, excises the more mawkishly sentimental moments from the play, and humanizes the characters so that the film seems less a postmodern zing at Madama Butterfly than a story of one man who saw his country’s relationship with another as a metaphor for sex and another man who saw sex as a metaphor for his country’s relationship with another, a small lie played out against the background of international politics and history.

M. Butterfly is Cronenberg’s least-known and most underrated work, far superior to his great cult hit, Scanners. At first blush, Butterfly, might appear to be an anomaly in Cronenberg’s oeuvre, something he might have as a director-for-hire to finance a future project more similar to his other work. While it’s true that the film is more emotionally direct and more sexually straightforward than most of his others, the same Cronenbergian themes and obsessions are at play and the usual complex relationships between people, bodies, and minds are all a major part of the story and the film should be considered a major entry in Cronenberg’s series of complicated and sophisticated literary adaptations — an equal to Crash, Naked Lunch, and Spider.

+Commentary with Cronenberg scholar William Beard

2.45GB | 1h 41m | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A540DE4FE9C5E2A/M.Butterfly.1993.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/598027D4C58C714/M.Butterfly.1993.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/50F8304C89D483D/M.Butterfly.1993.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/99EDBC250E2C3B8/M.Butterfly.1993.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post David Cronenberg – M. Butterfly [+Commentary] (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“The Death of David Cronenberg” is a short 1-minute film written by and starring filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor David Cronenberg.

“The Death of David Cronenberg” features the subject standing in a small, softly lit room. He wears a robe and looks deeply into the camera before his gaze shifts to a motionless figure in a bed. The film, a collaboration with Cronenberg’s daughter Caitlin, who shot and produced the film, explores mortality, surrealism, and the metamorphosis of life and death.

David Cronenberg is best known for exploring themes of bodily transformation, technology, and infection in films such as Shivers (1975), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986). He has directed over 20 films, written more than half of them, and acted in several others. His name has appeared on numerous “greatest director” lists including from Strange Horizons and The Guardian.

30MB | 56s 27ms | 1920×1012 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/37CAB434CD9CC61/The_Death_of_David_Cronenberg__David_Cronenberg,_2021__1080.mkv

Language(s):No Dialogue
Subtitles:None

The post David Cronenberg – The Death of David Cronenberg (2021) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
A mentally-disturbed man takes residence in a halfway house. His mind gradually slips back into the realm created by his illness, where he replays a key part of his childhood.

Spider.2002.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 38 min
Size: 	2.51 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by David Cronenberg)

https://nitro.download/view/3EE87570CE5DDE4/Spider.2002.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Portuguese

The post David Cronenberg – Spider (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.