I can talking on the phone to a boy in my class as my parents screamed for me to come down and watch the moon landing. Yeah right. I truly was the older sister in this movie.

Also made me recall going to the drive-in, the whole family shoved into a station wagon. My siblings always slept in the back, but I loved movies from early, early childhood and saw a lot of adult movies this way that I…

This film is my favorite Cronenberg and my favorite Jeremy Irons performance(s) as well. 

Cronenberg’s usual fascinations are there: complicated feelings about women, fascination with surgery, mutation and technology, and questions of identity and intimacy. 

But unlike most of his other films since this one, Dead Ringers is low on body horror scenes of explicit gore and more concerned with a drama of interpersonal relationships and identity. The tools for surgery on mutant women are terrifying and disturbing, as are…

Between this movie and Cronenberg’s The Brood, we get the picture: Divorce is Hell, especially on the children. And it makes screaming, drooling, bloody monsters of us all.

The film’s famous and incredibly intense performance from Isabelle Adjani has to be seen to be believed. She is an actress known for portraying emotional extremes, as she did in The Story of Adele H. and Camille Claudel, and this tops them all.

But even more surprising to me was the equally…