The Grandier High Witches!

We've got updates to yesterday's movie-nerd-rupturing news that Ken Russell's 1971 masterpiece The Devils has gotten a 4K restoration and it will premiere at Cannes later this month -- it's going to play in U.S. movie theaters too! It's getting a one week theatrical engagment on october 1th and there's the poster above -- the poster calls this "The Director's Cut" and they sent out more detail via their press release:

"Assembled from the original camera negative, this new 4K restoration presents Ken Russell's definitive vision of THE DEVILS by referencing the edit he privately constructed in 2004. KEN RUSSELL'S THE DEVILS is the uncut and unfiltered theatrical experience that Russell always envisioned - and the first time the film will be presented restored and in 4K... This new 4K restoration of Ken Russell's masterpiece was assembled from the original camera negative. The film's sound has been remastered from original English Composite 35mm Mag Film, transferred at 96kHz, plus other original film elements in selected spots as needed. "

Granted it's only been twenty-four hours but this news is still breaking my brain -- I can't believe the White Whale has been speared! While not confirming confirming a physical media release I hugely doubt we need to worry about that at this point -- now that it's not a one time Cannes thing I fully expect a 4K disc down the road. Hopefully in time for the holidays so every one of us sickos can gift our families The Devils in their stockings! Anyway they also sent along some images from the restored film and prepare to have your eyes blown back through your heads after the jump...

HOLY! F*CKING!! HELL!!!

Yes I realize that's the French poster for Ken Russell's The Devils there, but that's the poster I actually own and which hangs on my bedroom wall, so that's the one I'm using to share this incredible news I really wondered whether I'd ever be able to share in my entire life -- this movie, long banned and buried by the studio, has officially gotten a 4K restoration from Warnes Brothers and it will be premiering at Cannes this month. HELL HATH OFFICIALLY FROZEN OVER, Y'ALL. 

ME REACTING TO THIS 'THE DEVILS' NEWS

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) May 5, 2026 at 4:10 PM

There have actually been little whispers of this for the past several weeks so I'm not exactly crapping my pants here as I totally one hundred percent would have if this had come completely out of nowhere -- and to the people who were doing the whispering I can only say thank you, since nobody wants to crap their pants. Okay maybe our President does. But not me! I can safely say I am not a person who wants to crap my pants. Now do you see why you keep coming back here? You come for news about a notorious film classic that's been hidden away for literal decades and instead I go on a coprophilia tangent. Keepin' y'all on ya toes, baby! Just like Ken Russell did! 

For real though this is incredible fucking news. I have a DVD from the U.K. (or Germany?) of the movie, but obviously a 4K upgrade showcasing this film's tremendous beauty -- those Derek Jarman sets, my god! --  along with the fact that this is apparently trhe longest cut assembled since its release... well this is the movie news of the year, hands down. I know the version of the film I saw at MoMA ages ago before Russell died (he was there, I shared the air with Ken Russell, I am still not over that) was a longer version of the film than I'd seen before, but I'm terrible at keeping track of what cut's from what version et cetera. So how much of the "Rape of Christ" sequence has been dug up??? I'm agog y'all. AGOG. While I go on agogging below is a doc I uploaded onto YouTube thirteen years back that shows some of the "lost" footage (it's age-restricted cuz NSFW obviously):

Just Say No Kings

The only King I recognize is Derek Jarman's film Edward II (pictured above), and so I'm going to use a slice of its beefcake the way Derek intended -- to grab your attention whilst sneaking in a political message. This Saturday there are over 2000 protests scheduled around the country to combat President Nazi's little limp-dick birthday celebration happening, and I expect my MNPP'ers to represent! Click here for an interactive map where you can zoom in and find the one nearest yourself. I'll be scampering about NYC where no big surprise it'll be massive, but as that map shows you there are ones happening in the smallest of towns everywhere. I was proud to see how many are happening in the red farm-town districts of Upstate New York where I grew up -- there's basically one happening in every other town! It's wild. Anyway going to a protest and being among like-minded and mad-as-hell people is exceptionally good for one's mental health -- we're in this together and this is a great big opportunity to exercize our democratic constitutional rights in the face of genuine fascism. There are so many more of us than there are of these small pathetic creeps. Let's show them. 

44 Days Til 28 Years

Really big fan of this 28 Years Later poster which somehow makes me think of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, of Derek Jarman's set-design for The Devils, AND of a Dalek from Doctor Who all at goddamned once. That is some mad skillz yo. 

Make me think of all of these things in one image and you've won

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) May 7, 2025 at 3:04 PM

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Edward II (1991)

Piers Gaveston: Farewell, base stooping to the lordly peers:
my knee shall bow to none but to the King. As for the multitude, that are but sparks raked up in embers of their poverty... fuck 'em.

Quote of the Day

“He and I have this lovely long history of meeting at Hollywood events and being the two shy ones – both shy and tickled pink and pinching ourselves and looking forward to telling people at home, but not confident enough to step in and talk to, say, Angelina Jolie.”

-- That is Tilda Swinton talking about how she and Pedro Almodovar bonded at an Oscar party in 2008, and oh to be a wallflower planted beside those two eh? That quote is out of a truly wonderful long piece on the actor in The Guardian that I very much recommend taking the time with -- I thought I'd just skim it and then get back to it over lunch but I was one hundred percent sucked in. The part about Derek Jarman's death and all the AIDS deaths in that time period, and how she identified with the TV series It's a Sin from this past year, was especially moving. Anyway go read it! She is such a fascination and gift. Here is one more quote for the road:

"My experience of grief is a kind of emptying. All the stories stop, there is no road in front of you. It all just goes black, and it takes a long time to get over it.”

One Potato, Two Potato, Me Potato, You

They say that reality is stranger than fiction, but a good storyteller knows how to make reality even stranger still, and it turns out that Wes Hurley, the director of Potato Dreams of America, is a damned good storyteller. Potato Dreams tells Hurley's own autobiographical tale of growing up gay in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, tracing his unlikely path from watching bootleg American movies through static to eventually -- a thorough eventually -- making them himself. And it tells its often sad and scary story through big sparkly bursts of creative movie-magic -- what a gem this little Potato turns out to be.

Following an introductory quote from Quentin Crisp, because naturally, we first meet our little Potato (his mother's nickname for him) when he is indeed little, real little -- so little he's able to magically transform the scene of his mother being beaten by his father in front of him into a spectacular song-and-dance routine (but in black-and-white, because nobody in Vladivostok has a color TV yet) just by framing it in between his fingers. But this isn't just some Iron Curtain Walter Mitty, of gritty realism butting heads with fantastical escapes -- in Hurley's capable hands this Potato World, even in its seedier moments, always feels extra special.

The USSR of his youth is as hyper-stylized as late Fassbinder, half-naked Russian soldiers dance-fighting in silhouette against the horizon, stagey rubble scenery and prison-scene pietàs. This is the delectable stuff of a Jarman movie, purposefully pretend, memory made arch and unreal. Because how else would Potato, cinema-lover, remember anything? Time's turned my own remembrances of childhood poverty and abuse into their own operatic movements, with shifting scenery and stage directions -- it only feels right to go big or go home, and Hurley gets that.

Because as big as Hurley's embellishments go -- and Potato first figures out he's different from the other boys while watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with his new best friend Jesus Christ (yes, The Jesus Christ, played by Mean Girls actor Jonathan Bennett) for god's sake -- they land squarely on real feelings and a genuine shared experience I think any one of us can relate to. Okay, some of us more than others -- I too learned I was different from the other boys while watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. And I too dreamed of a way out of my frightening circumstances through the movies.

There are second and third act surprises I wouldn't want to ruin but Potato Dreams of America sees the young boy become a young man, switching actors and settings but never losing its sparkling sense of humor and community and wild creativity -- people keep surprising Potato, and the world keeps revealing itself to be weirder and, weirdly, kinder; as we move through the 90s and Potato learns of Gregg Araki and other gay people (in the Biblical sense) his story, so singular, really does begin to feel intrinsic to all our own. America might be a physical place but Hurley reminds us it's even more an idea, a boundless one, built on every immigrant imagination and dream.

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Potato Dreams of America is screening at SXSW right now!

Quote of the Day

“The first film of Pedro’s I saw was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I remember seeing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and feeling this enormous sense of relief. Here was a filmmaker making films about Europe and about people and a milieu that I recognised entirely—and at the same time, a contemporary artist whose reference to the cultural landscape of cinema makes him heir to so many great directors through film history, especially those great masters who have focused their narratives and their atmosphere on the lives and passions of women,” recalls Swinton. “Pedro was putting onto a global screen a sensibility and a vernacular which was close to the underground world I was living in with Derek Jarman in London in the ’80s and early ’90s. He was always our Spanish cousin, very dear and greatly cherished as a fellow traveller with brilliant moves.”

I had a tough time choosing a favorite quote from this interview with both director Pedro Almodóvar and actress Tilda Swinton on their fabulous short-film collaboration The Human Voice (which is screening in some art cinemas right this second!), there were several I was weighing, but you kinda can't beat Tilda talking her first Almodóvar and casually dropping Derek Jarman's name to boot. If you haven't seen The Human Voice yet do, ASAP -- it's the perfect dream of what you think it could be and I can't believe it missed an Oscar nomination this morning; malarkey, I say! I reviewed it for NYFF right here.

Watching My Grammys pic.twitter.com/m0oSJndnAR

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 15, 2021

In related news I watched Derek Jarman's 1978 punk-nuttery Jubilee for the first time last night -- it's streaming on the Criterion Channel -- and holy hell I was ashamed I hadn't seen that one before. I keep telling myself I need to just sit down and binge every Jarman movie I haven't seen, but that feels kind of like cheating -- they'd be all gone if I did that! No more Jarman to discover! I want them to come naturally to me, of their own accord, when we find the moment mutually right.

10 Off My Head: Tilda Is Love

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It always seems weird wishing Tilda Swinton a happy birthday -- as if time is a construct that applies to her! -- and yet here from where we humans sit she has been with us for 59 years as of November 5th 2019, and such a moment must be marked. An offering to the outer space deities who've gifted us with a sense of sight that catches her spectrum. I was surprised I'd never done a list of my favorite Tilda performances before but I checked the archives and found no such thing -- then I sort of stopped being surprised when I looked through her IMDb page and realized narrowing it down to the usual five was utterly inconceivable. And so we go with ten... although even these ten end up being more like fifteen given all her shape-shifting inside single films...

My 10 Favorite Tilda Performances

Blanc / Klemperer / Markos, Suspiria

"This isn't vanity! This isn't art!"

Eva, We Need To Talk About Kevin

"So the daddy bear plants his seed 

in the mommy bear 

and it grows into an egg."

Marianne, A Bigger Splash

"..."

Julia, Julia

"Well I'm not really down 

with the good neighbor shit."

Margaret, The Deep End

"Try harder?"

Isabella, Edward II

"He confesseth that he loves me not."

Mason, Snowpiercer

"My friend, you suffer from 

the misplaced optimism of the doomed."

Rosetta / Ruby / Marinne / Olive, Teknolust

"We crave... physical contact."

Orlando, Orlando

"I can find only three words 

to describe the female sex. 

None of which are worth expressing."

Emma, I Am Love

"Ahh right it's Thursday...

the countryside... the vegetables..."

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Runners-up: Michael Clayton, Trainwreck, Doctor Strange, 

The Chronicles of Narnia, Constantine, Broken Flowers, 

The Dead Don't Die, Burn After Reading, Only Lovers Left Alive,

Caravaggio, Love is the Devil... and on and on and on...

What are your favorite Tildas?
Let us know in the comments...

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Which is Hotter?

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Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings and Derek Jarman regular and a million billion other things actor Sean Bean is turning 60 today, and we've celebrated him several times here on the blog but weirdly never asked the following question so let's...

online survey

Quote of the Day

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“[The Oscar speech] … I have no memory of it, and please don’t remind me of what I said. Funnily enough, at that time, I’d never seen the Oscars on the television. I knew that it was a big deal, but it didn’t have any real impact in my life. I remember being a little bit disappointed that it wasn’t more magnificent, [that] it wasn’t in a bigger room. And then I thought, ‘Why are you disappointed?’ I realized it was because my reference was The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston — that was the only time I’d ever seen the Oscars, and it was in a much pumped-up version. Nobody ran across the stage or got shot or anything!”

Rolling Stone asked the goddess Tilda Swinton to give her recollections on several of her most important roles on film so far, what with Suspiria opening wide this weekend (read my review here), and what she remembers thinking about winning an Oscar for Michael Clayton has perfectly summed up my attitude about the Oscars without having ever realized it until this moment. 

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10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1991

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Somehow an entire month has passed since the last time I asked my telephone to give me a number between one and one hundred and went to choose my favorite movies from the corresponding year, otherwise known as our "Siri Says" series, but now that we're back to talking to our phone again like it's a person Siri went and picked an interesting year of movies for us - The Movies of 1991.

I became a freshman in High School in the fall of 1991, meaning I was heavy in my "I have no friends and I wish I was dead" period - ahh sweet memories. But I had the movies at least? Hey it's what's getting a lot of us, visiting here at this site anyway, through, so don't knock it. This was still a couple of years before I worked at the video-store that would shape my tastes for the better so at this point in time I was still watching tons of garbage - I was watching any and everything really. 

Point being I've seen a shit-ton from this year so I'm upping the list to 10. Looking back at the year now it's easy to whittle the crap down to the movies that matter, but I didn't fall for an awful lot of these until many years later - I sure wasn't laying my eyes on Todd Haynes or Derek Jarman or even Gus Van Sant at that exact point, something which probably would've benefitted my dumpy and isolated mood. Alas, hindsight, et cetera. Anyway onward and upward let's whittle that crap!

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1991

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

(dir. James Cameron)

-- released on July 1st 1991 --

Cape Fear

(dir. Martin Scorsese)

-- released on November 15th 1991 --

Poison

(dir. Todd Haynes)

-- released on April 5th 1991 --

Naked Lunch

(dir. David Cronenberg)

-- released on December 27th 1991 --

Raise the Red Lantern

(dir. Zhang Yimou)

-- released on December 17th 1991 --

Barton Fink

(dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)

-- released on August 21st 1991 --

The Silence of the Lambs

(dir. Jonathan Demme)

-- released on February 14th 1991 --

Soapdish

(dir. Michael Hoffmann)

-- released on May 31st 1991 --

Beauty and the Beast

(dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise)

-- released on November 22nd 1991 --

Thelma & Louise

(dir. Ridley Scott)

-- released on May 24th 1991 --

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Runners-up: LA Story (dir. Mick Jackson), Sleeping With the Enemy (dir. Joseph Ruben), What About Bob (dir. Frank Oz), Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (dir. Stephen Herek), JFK (dir. Oliver Stone), Fried Green Tomatoes (dir. John Avnet), Dead Again (dir. Kenneth Branagh)...

......  Dogfight (dir. Nancy Savoca), The Addams Family (dir. Sonnenfeld), The Lovers on the Bridge (dir. Leos Carax), Defending Your Life (dir. Albert Brooks), The Double Life of Veronique (dir. Kieslowski), Point Break (dir. Kathryn Bigelow), Shadows + Fog (dir. Woody Allen), Truth or Dare (dir. Alek Keshishian)...

... The Rapture (dir. Michael Tolkin), Edward II (dir. Derek Jarman), Grand Canyon (dir. Lawrence Kasdan), Boyz n' the Hood (dir. John Singleton), Whore (dir. Ken Russell), Mississippi Masala (dir. Mira Nair), Jungle Fever (dir. Spike Lee), My Own Private Idaho (dir. Gus Van Sant)

Never seen: High Heels (dir. Almodovar), Kafka (dir. Soderbergh), Europa (dir. Lars von Trier), Until the End of the World (dir. Wim Wenders), Close My Eyes (dir. Stephen Poliakoff)...

...... The Commitments (dir. Alan Parker), Flirting (dir. John Duigan), Prospero's Books (dir. Peter Greenaway), Scenes From a Mall (dir. Paul Mazursky), Toto the Hero (dir. Jaco Van Dormael), Night on Earth (dir. Jim Jarmusch)

What are your favorite movies of 1991?

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5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1976

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It took Siri seven times to give me a good answer to the question "Pick a number between 1 and 100" today - she kept choosing numbers that we've already done for this series. But she eventually landed on a goodie - pick number seven was "76" and so today we're going to focus in on The Movies of 1976.

I had a pretty easy time snatching out five films from this year for my top five (these are some of my all-time faves right here) but there are a whole heckuva lot of runners-up (I could make a top ten list of just horror movies from 1976) and there a whole heckuva lot of movies I've never seen but should see. That is all to say that this was a fine time for movies, y'all. How fine? Let's see!

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1976

Carrie

(dir. Brian De Palma)

-- released on November 16th 1976 --

The Tenant

(dir. Roman Polanski)

-- released on May 26th 1976 --

Chinese Roulette

(dir. RW Fassbinder)

-- released on November 16th 1976 --

Logan's Run

(dir. Michael Anderson)

-- released on June 23rd 1976 --

Taxi Driver

(dir. Martin Scorsese)

-- released on February 8th 1976 --

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Runners-up: Rocky (dir. John G. Avildsen),  Marathon Man (dir. John Schlesinger), All the President's Men (dir. Alan J. Pakula), The Man Who Fell to Earth (dir. Nicholas Roeg), The Omen (dir. Richard Donner), Burnt Offerings (dir. Dan Curtis)...

... Alice Sweet Alice (dir. Alfred Sole), Murder By Death (dir. Robert Moore), Assault on Precinct 13 (dir. John Carpenter), Network (dir. Sidney Lumet), Family Plot (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), God Told Me To (dir. Larry Cohen), The Food of the Gods (dir. Bert I. Gordon)...

... The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (dir. Nicolas Gessner), Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma), Heart of Glass (dir. Werner Herzog), The House of the Laughing Windows (dir. Pupi Avati), Lipstick (dir. Lamont Johnson), Sybil (dir. Daniel Petrie), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (dir. Charlies B. Pierce), Sebastiane (dir. Derek Jarman)

Never Seen: In the Realm of the Senses (dir. Nagisa Ôshima), Bugsy Malone (dir. Alan Parker), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dir. John Cassavetes), Harlan County USA (dir. Barbara Kopple), 1900 (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci), Freaky Friday (dir. Gary Nelson), Seven Beauties (dir. Lina Wertmüller ), A Star is Born (dir. Frank Pierson), Je t'aime moi non plus (dir. Serge Gainsbourg)

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What are your favorite movies of 1976?

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