Lunch at Midnight

“If there’s such a thing as an ideal time of day to expose yourself to the deranging, hallucinatory visions of the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, midnight might well be it,” writes critic and Criterion contributor Terrence Rafferty in a terrific New York Times tribute to those “mind-body-machine games” the director loves to play, a piece highlighting a Cronenberg midnight-movie series currently playing at Manhattan’s IFC Center. Of Naked Lunch he writes: “You have to be in a fairly savage mood to enjoy the movie’s grisly humor and reality-warping imagery, the kind of mood that can descend on you toward the end of a long, bad night, when everything around you starts to look creepy and alien, and your nerves are too frayed for sleep. That’s the Cronenberg state of mind.” Click here to read the whole piece, in which Rafferty also discusses the Criterion-released Videodrome and such other creepy-crawlies as The Fly, The Dead Zone, and eXistenZ.