Abel Ferrara
Bad Lieutenant and King of New York come out of a Catholic New York of all-night streets, where degradation and the hope of grace share a taxi. Ferrara has spent fifty years filming people at the exact moment they run out of excuses.
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Bad Lieutenant
While investigating a young nun's rape, a corrupt New York City police detective, with a serious drug and gambling addiction, tries to change his ways and find forgiveness.
Defining films
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Both obsessed with sin, redemption, and the transcendent trapped inside the body, Schrader's theology made flesh through Ferrara's Manhattan purgatory.
The body as battleground for invisible forces, illness, compulsion, spiritual decay rendered as physical horror, ecstatic and obscene.
Both brutalists of desire and faith, cinema stripped of sentiment, showing human wreckage with unflinching precision and secret compassion.
Shared vision of cinema as bodily experience, vulnerability exposed, desire unguarded, the everyday made luminous and dangerous.
