Life Blood

IMDb
New Year's Eve, 1969: While driving on the Pearblossom Highway, a lesbian couple encounters the creator of the universe. Laid to rest for 40 years, the women wake up on New Year's Day as reborn creatures.



HorrorNews

SYNOPSIS:

New Year’s Eve, 1968: While driving on the Pearblossom Highway, a lesbian couple encounters the creator of the universe. Laid to rest for 40 years, the women wake up on New Year’s Day as reborn creatures.

REVIEW:

Written & Directed by: Ron Carlson
Starring: Sophie Monk, Scout Taylor-Compton, Anya Lahiri, Patrick Renna, Charles Napier

QUICK FIX:

On New Year’s Eve 1968, lesbian lovers Brooke & Rhea go on the lam when one of them kills an arrogant assclown actor for sexually abusing another woman at a swinging 60s Hollywood-type party. So far, I’m in this thing with my full undivided attention. But along the way out of town Thelma & Louise style, Brooke runs over a raccoon or armadillo or something small and instead of throwing pedal to the metal, Bandit style, they pull over for a scene of freaking out. Not making out, unfortunately – freaking out. Suddenly, a desert sandstorm appears and wipes Brooke (the killer) from existence. Rhea (the good heart) is even more freaked out now when out of the sandstorm walks God Herself, only sadly it’s not Alanis Morrisette reprising her role from DOGMA, just some chick I’ve never seen before who isn’t as quirky or hot, and doesn’t even scream to blow up Ben Affleck for being a naughty angel.

Anyway, Goddess tells Rhea that she is to now be her immortal avenger of pure evil – consuming evil and kicking ass for the Lord as a vampire. But Rhea doesn’t want to spend immortality without her extremely unhinged love of her life and begs for Brooke to be her everlasting sidekick. Goddess is apprehensive at first, but soon relents and grants her wish with a warning about how Brooke will never be able to handle the truth or something. Forty years later, BAM, the girls wake up in the same spot in the desert, Brooke snacks on a hitchhiker and some unlucky motorist, and thus begins the battle of wills as Rhea futilely hopes beyond all hope that love will triumph over bloodlust, which gives a whole new meaning to the term “bleeding heart”…

RAMBLINGS:

I actually remember, while I was traveling on the road right around a year ago at this time, through one of the towns along my way I found a video store that was about to close down, and they were having this ginormous DVD sale – everything had to go. I saw this flick staring up at me then and the premise sounded so enormously cool to me that I knew I had to own it immediately. But then, ADD kicked in as I was distracted by something shiny (or more truthfully, a cute lil clerk asking me if she could show me anything…trick question right there, folks) and I wound up leaving LIFE BLOOD behind for another stack of horror flicks that were in the five for ten dollars pile. Then when this screener came to me a couple of weeks ago and I recognized the title, all those memories came flooding back. But after having watched it now, finally, I have to give a shout-out to Claire (or whatever her name was) for the distraction and for saving me the two dollars plus tax.

But first, I gotta say big props must be given for a really decent stab at an original take on a vampire flick, which is basically taking a randomly selected good-hearted lesbian and making her an unstoppable badass vampire killing machine on a heavenly mission to smite the wicked. Even though I can’t help but believe that with all the angry angels, crafty demons, and hungry leviathans flying around between Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (yeah, I watch SUPERNATURAL, got a problem with it?) that God needed to turn a lowly human into a vampire to strike down Her enemies, but hey, who am I to question?

Oh wait…I’m a reviewer, so I get to question all I want while I smite and strike down MY enemies in the name of the beast they call The Desolate One – the greatest unholy savior on the World Wide Web, The Almighty Horrornews!!! And question, I shall. And the enemy I’m smiting here? Easy…taking a premise that had the balls to be original and the promise of being entertaining and so kickass that I couldn’t wait for it to finally get going that…wait…I spent the next 80 or so minutes actually waiting for it to get going and instead watched it turn into very, very, very, very low-rent LEGION as the two girls waited out the sunlight in a roadside truck stop while Brooke tried half-heartedly to control her cravings while Rhea tried half-heartedly to control Brooke. Okay, if they’re immortal saviors for God against evil, why does sunlight bother them, vamps or not? Can’t they hunt during the day too, or does pure evil, just like the freaks, only come out at night what, what, what??

LAST WORDS:

Full movie on IwannaWatch

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The Unwanted

IMDb
In this Southern Gothic retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire story 'Carmilla,' a young drifter (Christen Orr) arrives in a rural town seeking the whereabouts of the mother she never knew. When she becomes sexually involved with an emotionally fragile waitress (Hannah Fierman), she exposes the secret of her mother's disappearance and incites the wrath of the girl's overprotective father (William Katt).



Rotten Tomatoes

In this Southern Gothic retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire story 'Carmilla,' a young drifter (Christen Orr) arrives in a rural town seeking the whereabouts of the mother she never knew. When she becomes sexually involved with an emotionally fragile waitress (Hannah Fierman), she exposes the secret of her mother's disappearance and incites the wrath of the girl's overprotective father (William Katt).

Full movie on Twomovie

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Bug

RogerEbert

William Friedkin's latest film, "Bug," begins as an ominous rumble of unease, and builds to a shriek. The last 20 minutes are searingly intense: A paranoid personality finds its mate, and they race each other into madness. For Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist," it's a work of headlong passion. 

Its stars, Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, achieve a kind of manic intensity that's frightening not just in itself but because you almost fear for the actors. They're working without a net. The film is based on a play by Tracy Letts, an actor and playwright at Chicago's Steppenwolf theater, that was a hit here and in New York.

In the film we meet Agnes (Judd), a waitress in a honky-tonk lesbian bar, living in a shabby motel. Her violent ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.), just out on parole, walks back into her life, still violent. At about the same time her gay friend R.C. (Lynn Collins) drags in a stray with haunted eyes. This is the polite stranger named Peter (Shannon) who says he doesn't want sex or anything else, is attentive and courteous, and is invited by Agnes to spend the night even though he seems (to us) like the embodiment of menace. 

The story involves this man's obsession with bugs that he believes infect his cells and may have been implanted by the government during his treatment for obscure causes after military service in the Gulf. We think he's crazy. Agnes listens and nods, and doesn't want him to leave; she feels safer around him. 

He begins to seem more weird. This doesn't bother her. With mounting urgency, she begins to share his obsession with bugs, and together they hurtle headlong into a paranoid fantasy that ties together in one perfect conspiracy all of the suspicions they've ever had about anything. There is a scene we're not prepared for, in which they're peering into a cheap microscope and seeing whatever they think they see. 

Michael is mad, and Agnes' personality seems to need him to express its own madness. Ashley Judd's final monologue is a sustained cry of nonstop breathless panic, twisted logic and sudden frantic insight that is a kind of behavior very rarely risked in or out of the movies. It may not be Shakespeare, but it's not any easier. 

Shannon, a member of A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago, delivers his own nonstop rapid-fire monologue of madness; he has a frightening speech that scares the audience but makes perfect sense to Agnes. His focus and concentration compares in some ways to Peter Greene's work in Lodge Kerrigan's frightening "Clean, Shaven." 

The film is lean, direct, unrelenting. A lot of it takes place in the motel room, which by the end has been turned into an eerie cave lined with aluminum foil, a sort of psychic air raid shelter against government emissions or who knows what else? "They're watching us," Peter says. 

The thing about "Bug" is that we're not scared for ourselves so much as for the characters in the movie. Judd and Shannon bravely cast all restraint aside and allow themselves to be seen as raw, terrified and mad. The core of the film involves how quickly Judd's character falls into sympathy with Shannon's. She seems like a potential paranoid primed to be activated, and yet her transformation never seems hurried and is always convincing. 

For Friedkin, the film is a return to form after some disappointments like "Jade." it feels like a young man's picture, filled with edge and energy. Some reviews have criticized "Bug" for revealing its origins as a play, since most of it takes place on one set. But of course it does. There is nothing here to "open up" and every reason to create a claustrophobic feel. Paranoia shuts down into a desperate focus. It doesn't spread its wings and fly.

IMDb

An unhinged war veteran holes up with a lonely woman in a spooky Oklahoma motel room. The line between reality and delusion is blurred as they discover a bug infestation.

Full Movie on Xmovie8

Orange is the New Black Season 2

WikiPedia
Orange Is the New Black is an American comedy-drama series, which premiered on July 11, 2013, on Netflix.^[1] The series, based on Piper Kerman's memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (2010), follows Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a happily engaged New Yorker who is sent to a women's federal prison for transporting a suitcase full of drug money across international borders, 10 years prior, for her ex-girlfriend (Laura Prepon).


HuffPost

f you're any good at binge watching, you're at least halfway through "Orange Is The New Black" by now. Maureen Ryan filed her review for Huff Post a day before the premiere, but we have plenty of energy left for analyzing Litchfield. To help you sort through all of the back stories, pie-throwing and strangely touching prison relationships, we bring you the best of the reviews of Season 2:

"Perhaps what's most notable about the first part of season two is how Kohan is more confident in her storytelling because she laid the foundation of these diverse characters in season one while also keeping the A storyline -- Piper’s shift from church mouse to aggressive, survival-mode inmate -- intriguing. Now she can give more depth to the worldview that's present in Orange Is the New Black, one of the most vibrant, surprising dramas you'll find anywhere." - The Hollywood Reporter

"In emphasizing the humanity of the inmates, their warders have been made to look, for the most part, pathetic, foolish or monstrous ... Indeed, this general spreading of sympathy, of going past stereotype to character — even with characters who began as stereotypes — is one of the best and most impressive things about the series. It matters that it is set in a minimum security prison, whose inmates are more luckless than evil, more preyed upon than predators. It matters that it is set in a minimum security prison, whose inmates are more luckless than evil, more preyed upon than predators." - Los Angeles Times

"It’s worth noting that some of the best, most natural writing in the show is done for the small group of male characters, including the corrections officer played by Michael Harney and the handyman played by Matt Peters. One of the better things in the season opener is a throwaway moment given to an unseen male officer addressing the handcuffed inmates in the plane: “We know you have a choice in your air travel. Kidding! You have no choice at all.” It’s just close enough to believable to be funny." -The New York Times

"Like 'Thrones,' 'Orange 'is partly a story of territory, allegiance and clans, here divided largely by race ... What Jenji Kohan does in this series is a bit like painting landscapes on a grain of rice; she shows that with enough attention to detail, the tiniest canvas can capture the universe." - Time

"As the series judiciously uses its flashback structure to fill in the whys of these women’s lives, we’re confronted with an array of socioeconomic, political, and emotional realities that makes every character, even small ones, feel truly distinct, and human. The dehumanizing nature of prisons, and the way that “convict” can come to trump all other defining characteristics, is certainly explored in the series, and it’s a woeful, scary thing to watch. But more excitingly, Kohan and her writers also look at how life flourishes and begins to boldly, starkly define itself in restriction. Prison isn’t exactly good for these women, but it does something to their essences, states them more loudly and forwardly than otherwise might be the case. And that’s fascinating to watch." - Vanity Fair

"[The] plot lines are about what they’re about, but they’re about ­something else, too; the “something else” is why they resonate beyond the final credits. Kohan’s series stacks the sociopolitical deck by having its mostly plucky heroines endure sneering condescension by emblems of the dominant culture. The problem isn’t the sentiments but the clunky way they’re expressed—as if the writers are reserving the good dialogue for the regulars, along with the empathy." - Vulture

"The show is often nasty and sometimes distastefully cruel to its characters, but it also easily forges a deep and authentic emotional connection to the viewer. There are frequent reminders that it’s as much of a dark comedy as it is a social study. In one of the new episodes, there is protracted debate about the location of the urethra in relation to the vagina — a matter definitively settled by Burset, a transgender inmate (played by Laverne Cox) — and a competition between two lesbian inmates, Big Boo and Nichols (Lea DeLaria and Natasha Lyonne) to see who can seduce the largest number of inmates, with a special emphasis on orgasm. I sometimes like to imagine the male-centric world of TV showrunners, producers, writers and even critics getting light-headed and passing out while they watch the show." - Washington Post

Full Season on Xmovie8

Orange is the new Black season 1

Rotten Tomatoes

SEASON INFO

Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a thirtysomething woman who, by all appearances, has her life together, is suddenly sentenced to a 15-month prison stay at Litchfield Correctional Facility in Danbury, Connecticut, for transporting drug money a decade earlier per the request of her ex- girlfriend (Laura Prepon). Once behind bars, Piper contends not only with the "fishbowl" of prison life (where seemingly miniscule infractions can leave one starved, stalked, or worse off), but the challenges of maintaining a long-distance relationship with her fiancé, Larry (Jason Biggs).

IGN

JULY 30, 2013 Netflix is continuing its hot streak of releasing entire binge-worthy seasons of television at once with Orange is the New Black, the latest comedy/drama series from Weeds creator Jenji Kohan.  Based on the autobiographical book of the same name, Orange is the New Black centers itself on Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a privileged and naive Brooklynite sentenced to a year in prison for a drug-related crime she committed ten years ago.

If you find the ‘misunderstood white guy/girl toughens up in prison and leaves a better person’ formula wearisome, fear not. Orange is the New Black is as much about the cast of characters Piper meets behind bars as it is her own self-discovery.  It’s a multi-faceted show that opens itself up to you the longer you persevere with it, an easy task thanks to Netflix’s generous distribution model. This just might very well be the future of television, everybody. Say goodbye to the water cooler.

Orange's most brilliant trick is to play with our expectations by presenting us with archetypes and then twisting them into real people. In the first couple of episodes we think we've got the show’s fish-out-of-water shtick all figured out as the hilariously green Piper tries to adjust to the lack of niceties in prison, but the formula is quickly subverted as Piper realizes she has no idea who the hell she is without her “WASP” trappings. “I became the nice blond lady that I was supposed to be,” she reveals of her life on the outside. And without her artesian soaps and perfectly pleasant fiance Larry (American Pie’s Jason Biggs), what does she have?

There’s a secondary conundrum for Piper. Despite the fact she’s happily engaged to Larry, she’s stuck inside with her ex-drug-smuggling ex-girlfriend Alex, played with sultry coolness by That ‘70s Show’s Laura Prepon.It’s a plot point that stirs things up for all three characters and further challenges our perceptions of Piper; privileged, well-to-do straight girls aren’t supposed to have pasts littered with drugs and lesbian lovers, after all.Through Piper’s eyes, we meet more archetypes. There’s the ex-junkie. The nun. The transgender hairdresser. The hippie. The Russian matriarch. The meth head Jesus freak, whom Alex describes as a ’Deliverance extra.’  At first, they are presented in broad, scary strokes – because Piper’s first impressions of them are broad and scary - and then they are unfurled through a peppering of flashbacks to their former lives.

It’s a clever technique, allowing for measured and graceful storytelling. These stories are told with honesty and are never overcooked; the writers and the cast have far too much respect for their characters to make fun of them or claw at our tear-ducts with heavy-handed misery.

Take Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst), for example, an older inmate whose viciousness has inspired urban legends. We meet her as an angry shut-in, but her story reveals an entirely different character whose fatal flaw had nothing to do with meanness. Yoga Jones (Constance Shulman ) is a calming and zen character, but the reasons for her incarceration reveal a darker side. There’s no moralizing here, only sad truths.

The show is at times riotously pulpy.  The prison ‘society’ itself operates in a highly-charged political landscape, ghettoized by ethnicity (“it’s tribal. Not racist.”) Guards wrestle inmates and each other for power, sexual or otherwise. Social minutiae are chronicled and judged. "Women fight with gossip and words,” a counselor tells Piper, and certainly, as the venom is slung, you might shock yourself by cheering on your favourite team like some sort of deranged onlooker.

While occasionally graphic, sex in Orange is the New Black never feels gratuitous. It is a guilty pleasure, or a stolen luxury, or an exhibition of power. For Sophia (Laverne Cox), a transgender woman, sexuality is a commodity, something to be bargained with. It is sex above all, perhaps, that tends to unite these women, wherever they sit on the spectrum.

The show does, very occasionally, teeter on the edge of unsubtlety. Flashbacks to Piper and Larry’s hip young life intended to serve as contrast to her current misery tends to grate, because we already understand their privilege. Further, some of the characters living on the ‘outside’ slip oddly into caricature; Larry’s parents and Piper’s mother in particular seem roughly sketched. But they are the minority.

The cast is outstanding. Schilling is excellent as Piper, taking her from a comically hipster-esque yuppie to a self-centred train-wreck, and somehow preserving our empathy. But it’s with the broader characters that Orange is the New Black blossoms, with Kate Mulgrew’s tough-as-nails ‘Red,’ with Natasha Lyonne’s dry ex-junkie, Nicky, with Uzo Aduba’s Crazy Eyes, a character so fascinating it would be a crime to spoil her here.

THE VERDICT

These are the women whose stories we rarely – if ever – see on television, and they’re all here, in one place, behind bars. The flashback technique ensures the show has plenty of longevity, as long as there are enough black, Latina, white, straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, poor and rich women to fill it, and somehow, I don’t think that will be a problem.

Full Season 1 on Xmovie8

Imagine Me & You

Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

A new bride finds she's tempted to leave her husband under circumstances she never anticipated in this romantic comedy-drama. Rachel (Piper Perabo) and Heck (Matthew Goode) are longtime sweethearts who have decided to take the plunge and get married, but on the day of their wedding, while Rachel is walking down the aisle, she finds herself struck by the beauty of Luce (Lena Headey), who has been hired to do the floral arrangements for the ceremony. While Rachel thinks little of this at first, she finds she can't get Luce out of her mind, and when Rachel invites Luce over to dinner in hopes of fixing her up with Coop (Darren Boyd), Heck's best friend and best man, she learns the lovely florist is a lesbian. When Rachel and Luce meet again while shopping, they strike up a friendship that deepens into something more, until Rachel declares her attraction to Luce -- and Luce reveals she feels the same way. Rachel has never had a relationship with a woman before, and while she's fallen deeply in love with Luce, she isn't at all sure of what to do next, and Heck soon realizes something has gone wrong in their marriage. Produced under the title Click, Imagine Me & You was the first directorial credit for screenwriter Ol Parker. ~ Mark Deming, Rov

After Ellen Review

We open in London on the day of Rachel’s (Lost and Delirious‘s Piper Perabo) wedding to her best friend and longtime boyfriend, Hector (Matthew Goode). In attendance are the couple’s friends, family, and, at the request of Rachel’s younger sister, the wedding’s florist Luce (Lena Headey). Before the end of the reception, Luce is becoming fast friends with all of Rachel’s family, fending off advances from more than one man in Heck’s party, and on her way to becoming more than friends with the new bride.

Thus we have the beginnings of the love triangle, as Rachel’s romantic feelings for Luce throw a wrench into her plans to marry Heck.

In essence, this film is a romantic comedy with queer content with precious few of the pitfalls often found in movies about romantic triangles. There’s no stupidity about relationships, no unrealistic, tired, comical misunderstandings, the primary and important secondary characters are three dimensional, acting and production values are high quality, cliché and stereotype are at a minimum, and last but not least from a lesbian/bi perspective, we have a mainstream film in which a gay relationship is central, and positively presented.

This is due to a number of reasons, one being that it was primarily a UK production so, though bought by Fox Searchlight for distribution,Hollywood was largely uninvolved in the making of the film.

Writer and director Ol Parker is at pains not to present lesbian relationships as inherently different from straight ones, while not going out of his way to force the issue, and not boxing queer relationships into having to conform to the straight person ideal mould either.

At the same time he is aware that much of his audience will not be used to seeing queer relationships this way, and is in a sense counting on it. In the Q & A after the screening, he told us that he had originally written it to be about a man and a woman, but found that people found parts of the story development too predictable, thus he discovered that he was actually writing a gay film.

Gay though it is, the relationship’s gayness is presented as an everyday sort of occasion. We don’t have to see a tortured “I can’t be gay” scene, or another terrible coming out with an unsupportive family.

It is worth noting that while Luce identifies as gay, Rachel never says, in so many words, how she views her sexuality. She’s just fallen in love, and the person in question happens to be a woman; a modern, fluid way of showing a sexuality.

Also up to date is the way that straight characters view gay relationships and gay people. In other words, we’ve got a lot of progress in acceptance and lack of resistance, but some inequities and unconscious imagery linger. So there is some eyebrow raising at Flowered Up, Luce’s shop, but it is momentary, and Rachel’s mother raises the issue of grandchildren if Luce and Rachel are together, which sets things up for Anthony Stewart Head to deliver a perfect line about turkey basters.

Heck’s difficulty is the same as it would be if Rachel was in love with another man. Heck’s friend Cooper (Darren Boyd) fancies Luce, and is undaunted by the news that Luce is gay, saying “Anyone can change teams … well, I mean not anyone… I wouldn’t”.

Getting back to elements not concerned with gay visibility, the casting was spot on. Parker said that in casting, he had a policy of casting only people who he liked and hoping that the fun and interplay between the actors would carry through onscreen. From the excellent chemistry displayed on screen, I’d say his strategy worked.

The supporting roles are also well cast. We get to see Anthony Head (Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Giles) putting in a terrifically funny performance as a none-too-bright, loving father, Ned, who nonetheless has some very perceptive things to say, playing opposite Celia Imrie, in a part written for her, as his long-suffering “I know better than you and we both know it” wife.

Boo Henderson as the little girl, “H”, is an absolute delight not to be missed.

If I were to characterize the way this story was written and presented, high on the list would be balance. Parker keeps situations and dialogue in good taste, bringing strong, honest emotion and sympathy into play, while being quite funny at the same time.

The result is a beautiful, touching, sensitive and sweet–without being cloying–stunner of a lovely film that deserves to be seen, even if, as in my case, romantic comedies aren’t usually your thing.

So, if you’re looking for a really good date movie this Valentine’s Day, don’t rent High Art. Bring her to Imagine Me and You.

Full Movie on VIOOZ

Desert Hearts

I was Told one of my Pastor Likes this Movie




Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

Director Donna Deitch makes a strong impression in her first feature film, a simple story of a lesbian love affair, based on Jane Rule's 1964 novel Desert of the Heart. Helen Shaver stars as Vivian Bell, an uptight 35-year-old Columbia University professor who travels to Reno to get a divorce. She arrives in Reno on her way to Frances Parker's (Audra Lindley) ranch, where she is staying to establish six weeks of residency in order to obtainthe divorce. Once at the ranch, Vivian catches the fancy of Frances's adopted daughter Cay (Patricia Charbonneau), a casino worker ten years younger than herself. Vivien tries to remain unruffled as Cay makes unabashed overtures to her. Cay thinks that all Vivian needs is the love of another woman, and soon enough the two are in each other's arms. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

RogerEbert

"Desert Hearts" tells the story of a woman in her 30s who suddenly is awakened to the turmoils of passionate love, and because that is basically a simple story, this is basically a simple movie. What makes it unusual is that the story is set in the 1950s and the woman falls in love with a lesbian.

The movie stars Helen Shaver, an underrated Canadian actress of cool elegance, as Vivian, a professor at Columbia University in New York who travels by train to Reno to get a divorce. Patricia Charbonneau plays Cay, the direct, unabashed woman who falls in love with her at first sight. The third woman in the story is Frances (Audra Lindley), the no-nonsense older woman who runs the guest ranch where would-be divorcees wait out their Nevada residency requirements.

The story is nothing if not direct. Vivian arrives in Nevada, all cloaked in her proper New York fashions, and looks completely out of place on the ranch. Cay, a bubbly tomboy, befriends her and then falls in love with her, and becomes convinced that what Vivian needs is the love of another woman. Vivian plays coy for a long time (too long, in terms of the movie's dramatic pacing) and then surrenders.

Then there is a sex scene of surprising power. Although "Desert Hearts" is not in any sense an exploitation movie, it does depend on that sex scene in order to work - because the movie's structure is so clearly leading up to just such a scene.

I might have enjoyed "Desert Hearts" more if it had been more subtle and observant about the two women. It might have been a better movie if it had been about discovery instead of seduction. The screenplay by Natalie Cooper would have benefitted from an overhaul (there are times when the actresses are stuck there on the screen, reciting lines that are awkwardly literal and designed only to further or explain the plot). And yet "Desert Hearts" has undeniable power, and the power comes, I think, from the chemistry between Shaver and Charbonneau.

You probably have seen Shaver before, but you may not be quite sure who she is. Her widest exposure came in the TV series "United States." She has wide-set, intelligent eyes and a quick smile, and it is a revelation in this movie when she finally lets down her hair and relaxes. Patricia Charbonneau is a newcomer in her first role, and she has such a direct, unaffected strength that I imagine we'll be seeing more of her.

The two women circle each other like wary competitors during the opening stages of "Desert Hearts," and because you can see the intelligence in their eyes as well as the lust in their hearts, the drama is much stronger than the dialogue.

Then, eventually, comes the big love scene, and the reason it is so strong, I think, is that the director, Donna Deitch, didn't try to make it fancy. Instead of turning it into some kind of erotic music video - in which the real subject is not sex but the director's cleverness - she lets the scene build according to its own rhythms. The result is one of the few genuinely powerful erotic passages in recent movies. (Where did so many directors get the idea that passion in the editing room equates passion on the screen, and that if you have lots of fancy cutting, that indicates great sex?) "Desert Hearts" was made on a small budget, and this is one film where it didn't help to cut corners. (I have a notion they would have done some scenes over if they'd had the time and money.) The movie makes no large statement; it is not a philosophical exploration of lesbianism, just the story of two women and their attraction. It's not a great movie, but it works on its own terms.

Full Movie on PutLocker
The behind-the-scenes at onemorelesbian