Femmes Fatales:

Deadly dames and murderous man-eaters

issue sixty To mark the restoration of Otto Preminger’s magnificent Laura, we celebrate femmes fatales, including Peggy Cummins’s gutsy bank robber in Gun Crazy and Barbara Stanwyck’s sassy social climber in Baby Face. We have a feature on female action heroines and a Comic Strip on Twin Peaks temptresses while Reel Sounds is enthused by a wild jazz scene in The Phantom Lady and in Alter Ego Katy Darby is Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction.

New cinema releases include the intelligent, creepy cult victim tale Martha Marcy May Marlene, the excellent James Ellroy-scripted LA crime thriller Rampart, Polanski’s ferociously funny middle-class satire Carnage, and Cronenberg’s disastrous A Dangerous Method. And we have a feature on doyenne of lesbian cinema Barbara Hammer, who is the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern.

In the DVDs, we review 70s Vietnam vet vigilante drama Rolling Thunder and Bulgarian neo-noir Zift, and to give context to the latter’s interest in bodily waste, we have an article on toilet scenes in cinema.

In Short Cuts, we review the screening of Swedish feminist porn shorts Dirty Diaries at the London Short Film Festival while Cine Lit peruses the latest film books. In the Film Jukebox, soulful, dreamy chamber popsters The Tindersticks pick their favourite films. ■