The Essentials: The Films Of Abel Ferrara

​​“My existence is about making movies, so I’ve just got to rock and roll with the punches.”

That’s a quote from the inimitable, Bronx-born Abel Ferrara, one of the most brilliant and infamous filmmakers currently living. For nearly half a century now, Ferrara has been rocking and rolling with the punches; yes, Ferrara has technically been making movies that long, if you count scabrous early shorts “The Hold-Up” and “Nicky’s Film” (respectively about a gas station robbery, and a schmuck in hock to the mob). In the process, Ferrara has created some of the most idiosyncratic, unhinged genre cinema ever to see distribution in America.

Ferrara has navigated nearly every creative obstacle one can think of over the course of his fifty-year career: addictions that nearly killed him, feuds that fed into his bad-boy image, controversies that derailed his meteoric rise, and the fact that hiring him was, at one point, considered a professional liability.  Against the odds, everything that Ferrara has made since “Pasolini” has felt noticeably more tranquil than the in-your-face outlaw art that the director was associated with earlier in his career, “Bad Lieutenant” and “King Of New York,” of course, being the desert-island classics from that era. 

Not unlike fellow statesman Martin Scorsese, Ferrara is often unfairly pigeonholed as a tough-guy auteur who essentially makes one kind of movie. If we’re to subscribe to this reductive philosophy, Scorsese exclusively makes gangster films (incorrect, tell that to your friend whose favorite Marty joint is “The Age Of Innocence”). Ferrara, meanwhile, gets labeled as a poet of modern America’s lower criminal depths, which is to ignore the fact that the guy has made studio horror movies (“Body Snatchers”), theological doodles (“Mary”), and many documentaries. Abel’s filmography is more far-reaching than you might have realized, which is only one of the reasons why we’ve decided that now is the perfect time for a list that provides you with Abel Ferrara’s Essential films.

Ferrara’s latest feature debuted at Locarno back in August: I refer to the Ethan Hawke-starring end-of-times indie “Zeros And Ones,” described by the director himself as “A Casbah-esque landscape of noir streets, the feeling of Paris at the end of the occupation – but set in today’s post-modern, ancient and unchangeable Rome.” Our own Jessica Kiang was impressed, if a bit puzzled out by Ferrara’s latest apocalyptic vision, calling “Zeros” a “fascinating, ferocious funsuck” and praising the virtuoso cinematography of frequent Safdie Brothers D.P. Sean Price Williams, whose work in the film apparently “[pushes] low-light digital photography to the limits of intelligibility and sometimes beyond” (Abel has already stirred up controversy by announcing that his “Zeros And Ones” follow-up will be a biopic about the Italian saint Padre Pio starring the recently canceled Shia LaBeouf). 

In any case, here is the list of our favorite, the most memorably depraved, the most essential Abel Ferrara films.

“The Driller Killer” (1979)
Everyone knows making rent in New York City is tough; this was probably even truer in the ’70s, when crime, drugs, and industrial decay were seemingly pervasive. But what if you were a dead-broke, strung-out street artist so behind on your monthly rent that the only thing that gave you even a second of cathartic release involved murdering strangers with a drill gun? Such is the deliciously twisted premise for Ferrara’s uncompromising punk debut “The Driller Killer,” one of the infamous “video nasties” of its time and also the first non-pornographic film directed by the man who would eventually become one of 20th-century cinema’s more controversial auteurs. Ferrara shot the film in his own Union Square apartment, and while “Driller Killer” is perhaps more unprocessed than the later masterpieces, there’s enough groundwork laid here for the usual Abel motifs – kinky sexuality, transgressive subcultures, Catholic iconography – that this ranks as a fascinating point of entry into one of the great filmographies of our time. [B]

“Ms. .45” (1981)
Even by the grim standards reserved for an early Abel Ferrara picture, “Ms. .45” is not for the squeamish: the rape-revenge neo-feminist cult classic stars Ferrara’s ill-fated junkie muse, Zoë Lund, as a mute seamstress who is repeatedly assaulted before deciding to execute her assailants, and a host of other men, with a .45 caliber pistol. The film is designed to push even the most de-sensitized viewers right to the edge; like “Driller Killer,” it’s another story of an aggrieved city-dweller reacting to a cruel world with increasingly outsized, even justified hostility, and while the movie is every bit as sordid as you’d expect, Ferrara never exploits Lund or her tragic plight for sensationalist grindhouse-movie thrills. The film builds and builds to a sustained explosion of carnage, wherein Lund, iconically dressed as a nun in the film’s most bitterly knowing flourish, realizes there is no chance for salvation in a world this rotten. [A-]

“Fear City” (1984)
More than many other Ferrara pictures, the plot of “Fear City” almost sounds traditional: this grimy, unreasonably entertaining piece of exploitation-movie termite art stars Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, and Jack Scalia in a corpse-strewn yarn about a crooked cop and a boxer-turned-burlesque-club-promoter who are forced to take desperate measures when they learn that a deviant killer is targeting their dancers across the greater N.Y.C. area. “Fear City,” which is the third collaboration between Ferrara and regular screenwriter Nicholas St. John, is pure ’80s tri-state sleaze, more William Lustig’s “Vigilante” than prototypical police procedural, and yet it all-too-convincingly paints a portrait of a city gone mad with bloodlust and cheap, easy thrills. As far as the director’s ’80s run is concerned, it’s one of Ferrara’s more unfairly overlooked pictures. [A-]

“China Girl” (1987)
Of course, Abel understands the fury, the lust, the bawdy humor, and the innate tragedy of Shakespeare – it’s just that his take on the Bard involves a turf dispute between warring street gangs in N.Y.C.’s Little Italy and Chinatown, respectively, with two star-crossed delinquent lovers caught in the crossfire. The magic trick of “China Girl,” a highlight of Ferrara’s ’80s period, is that it’s every bit as dirty and disreputable as his most notorious work, and yet there is a real, affecting sense of romance at its core. The lovers of “China Girl” aren’t just striking a pose: not only do they adore each other, but they’d die for one another, a prospect which becomes more lethally plausible as the film winds its way towards its bloody, inevitable climax. The film may not be Abel’s masterpiece, but as a gleaming, tough-hearted bubblegum genre riff that grooves to a dancehall beat, there’s nothing quite like it. [B+]

“King Of New York” (1990)
We should never look to Quentin Tarantino for sensitive takes on Black pop culture, but the “Pulp Fiction” writer/director may have been correct when he told Bill Simmons, on the latter’s “Rewatchables” podcast, that Ferrara’s drug-world masterpiece “King Of New York” was a landmark of early ’90s hip-hop cinema. There is little, if any, actual rapping in “King,” but the inimitable grit and swagger of East Coast Mafioso rap gods like Raekwon and Mobb Deep are all over this thing; hell, even Biggie Smalls eventually adopted the moniker Frank White, which just so happens to be the name of Christopher Walken’s serpentine, chillingly cool-eyed kingpin protagonist. This is Walken’s first collaboration with Ferrara, and it remains one of his most brilliant performances: Frank is a monster, but because Walken lends him a broken soul, but by the time the walls do finally close in on the poor bastard, we’ve come to care for him, even if it could be argued that we shouldn’t. An underworld masterpiece, and really, one of the great ’90s gangster flicks. [A+]

“Bad Lieutenant” (1992)
If serial killer David Berkowitz hadn’t coined the phrase “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.,” that queasy greeting would have made a hell of a tagline for Ferrara’s masterpiece, “Bad Lieutenant,” which is nothing less than one of the most disturbing and unsparing American films ever made. Harvey Keitel bares his soul, gets naked, and gives his most ferocious performance as an unnamed, bigoted, heroin-abusing, gambling-addicted New York City cop navigating his own hellish downward spiral as he probes the rape of a nun in Hell’s Kitchen. Nothing can prepare uninitiated viewers for the merciless onslaught of Keitel’s increasingly pitiable bottoming-out: even when confronted with a vision of the Christian savior himself, all the character can do is declare the deity a “rat f*#k.” Again: what salvation is there in a world this fucked-up? Some of the heroin scenes in “Lieutenant” are almost impossible to watch now when one considers the fate of Zoë Lund. However, the fact that Ferrara’s most difficult film still concludes with the suggestion of absolution tells you a lot about the charitability of the guy’s worldview. [A+]

“Body Snatchers” (1993)
At first glance, the idea of the maniac who made “Bad Lieutenant” agreeing to tackle a re-imagining of a venerated, widely beloved sci-fi property – “Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,” which was adapted brilliantly by Don Siegel in his kooky 1956 B-movie iteration, and then again in the terrifying 1978 remake helmed by Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”) – seems like the very definition of a for-hire job. And while the third official “Body Snatchers” movie is undeniably more conventional than Ferrara’s scuzzy early works, his take still functions efficiently as a grave allegorical warning against the insidious powers of conformity and groupthink. Ferrara and screenwriters Stuart Gordon, Nicholas St. John, and Dennis Paoli make some substantial changes from previous versions of the story, transposing the action from California to Alabama and adopting a decidedly more grounded, less campy tone; to this day, as a work of pod-people horror, “Body Snatchers” possesses an uncanny power. [B]

“The Addiction” (1995)
Abel Ferrara is someone who clearly understands the irrational pangs of hunger that define an addict’s demanding lifestyle, and the masterstroke of his stark, grungy Gothic mood piece “The Addiction” is how it weaponizes the metaphor of vampirism to illustrate how our most self-destructive, all-consuming desires can never really be sated. Lili Taylor stars as an NYU philosophy major who is bitten by a strange woman one night and shortly thereafter develops an unquenchable thirst for human blood. No matter how much our heroine consumes, it’s never enough. Apart from the film’s engrossingly stylish black-and-white patina – certainly, one could argue that “The Addiction,” with its unorthodox narrative structure, trippy visual poetry, an evocation of New York at its least-hospitable, marks the beginning of Abel’s ongoing experimental phase – the central allegory in Nicholas St. John’s screenplay, for narcotic dependency as a form of unending spiritual death, is one that still cuts close to the bone today. [A-]

“The Funeral” (1996)
While “The Funeral” lacks the jumpy, agitated, purse-snatching energy of “Ms. .45” and “Bad Lieutenant” – as an Abel Ferrara crime picture, it has more in common with the gloomy, languorous veneer of “The Godfather” than it does with “Fear City” – it is nevertheless a ravishing period thriller that hums with the director’s dark, recognizable obsessions. Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, and Vincent Gallo are all tremendous as three mob-connected siblings living and “working” in the politically tumultuous New York of the 1930s; the film is framed as a kind of elegiac recollection, told, yes, from the vantage point of one of the brother’s funerals. Apart from the fact that some interesting anecdotes have emerged from Gallo’s time working with Ferrara (Google “Vincent Gallo Abel Ferrara” and you’ll see what we mean), “The Funeral” is nevertheless a disquieting example of Ferrara bringing his simmering trademark touch to a story that might have registered as familiar in literally anyone else’s hands. [A-]

“New Rose Hotel” (1998)
After the head-clearing hangover of “The Blackout,” the dirtbag-cyberpunk love story “New Rose Hotel” is the first Abel Ferrara movie to truly feel like a dream. The early scenes in this jazzy cinematic head-trip are awash in a euphoric sense of disorientation – Where are we? Is this the future? What’s John Lurie doing here? – that eventually gives way into a hypnotic, alien vibe that will read as alluring to some and inscrutable to others. “New Rose Hotel” is also significant in the context of Ferrara’s larger filmography in that it’s his first-ever collaboration with Willem Dafoe, an actor who would arguably go on to become the director’s most significant creative collaborator. Dafoe plays the more restrained foil to Christopher Walken’s peacocking wild man; both are corporate guns-for-hire who become ensnared in the work of a mysterious call girl (Asia Argento). We assure you, though, plot matters not here: “New Rose Hotel” is pure, transcendent mood, sinuous, druggy, and ripe for a rewatch. [B+]

“Mary” (2005)
Sure, Abel Ferrara is a guy who directed a scene wherein a cracked-out Harvey Keitel jerks off against the side of a car as two helpless women stare at him in helpless, bug-eyed disbelief. Still, despite his enduring fascination with America’s underbelly, the motif of faith runs through nearly all his films. Like Martin Scorsese, Ferrara was raised Catholic, which is all a necessary prelude in mentioning that his only real attempt at a quasi-Biblical experimental drama, “Mary,” is every bit as unusual as you’d expect. The film offers up a kind of Brechtian, film-within-a-film conflict whilst boasting one of Ferrara’s most star-studded casts, an ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Heather Graham, and Marion Cotillard. This one is largely for the Ferrara die-hards, but “Mary” also functions as a sporadically riveting, admirably unorthodox example of what happens when a great artist is liberated from the expectations that are thrust upon them. [B]

“4:44 Last Day On Earth” (2011)
Not too long ago, “4:44 Last Day On Earth” was mostly viewed as a kind of meditative outlier from a filmmaker more renowned for his signature intensity. This human-scaled doomsday drama received somewhat tepid reviews upon release and was generally disregarded as a tossed-off experiment before the more official return to form that was “Welcome To New York.” That said, viewed in the terrifying midst of a still-ongoing global pandemic, “4:44” – which focuses on a couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) spending their final hours together before the planet’s protective ozone layer is decimated at 4:44 EST, and life on earth ceases to exist – is distressingly prophetic. The film may be one of Ferrara’s warmer pictures on the whole, but we suspect its sobering depiction of planetary collapse will stand the test of time, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. [B+]

“Pasolini” (2018)
Anyone looking for a timid, cut-and-dry telling of the life and times of the rule-breaking cinematic radical known as Pier Paolo Pasolini – as if anyone would ever be interested in a prospect so trite! – should stay miles away from Abel Ferrara’s rhapsodic, devastating “Pasolini,” which is less of a straightforward biopic and more a fever-dream rumination on what it means to be a renegade who colors outside the proverbial lines of polite society. Ferrara understands the deviancy and damage that Pasolini sought to explore in films like “Accattone” and “Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom,” and along with his muse/bro, Willem Dafoe (doing some of his most dialed-down work for the ordinarily more keyed-up director here), Ferrara fashions a gorgeously nonlinear love letter to cinema itself that’s all the more effective for how unexpectedly poignant it turns out to be. [A]

“Tommaso” (2019)
Whereas so much of Ferrara’s early-to-mid career was spent in a kind of speed-freak pursuit of pure momentum, often for the sake of itself, “Tommaso” – which, along with “Pasolini” and “Siberia,” forms a kind of unofficial trilogy about pensive, middle-aged male loners – is more concerned with looking back in time. Played with moody understatement by Willem Dafoe, the film’s namesake protagonist, a sober addict living in Rome, spends pretty much all his time mulling over the wreckage of the life he’s led: assessing the damage, losing himself in daydreams, and ultimately, asking himself if all the self-abasement was worth it. In that sense, “Tommaso” – which is as serene as “King Of New York” is sociopathically self-possessed – feels like the closest thing to a confession that we’ll ever get from this indispensable American storyteller. For that reason alone, it ranks as one of Ferrara’s most tender works. [A-]

HONORABLE MENTION:
It’s admittedly a lesser-seen T.V. movie, but Abel completists should most definitely add “The Gladiator” – a gruesome 1986 slasher about a psycho who murders people with his car, a film that may or may not have influenced Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” – to their watchlists (sadly, Abel’s other made-for-T.V. effort from this period, “The Loner,” isn’t really worth the trouble). The bananas-sounding, capital-P problematic behind-the-scenes drama that defined the production of the director’s seamy, Elmore Leonard-penned tropical neo-noir “Cat Chaser” is almost more entertaining than the film that was released theatrically in 1989, although the rumor has always been that there is a three-hour “masterpiece” cut floating out there in the ether somewhere.

“Dangerous Game” is a film that very nearly made this list: it’s one of Abel’s most scurrilous and self-lacerating dramas, an electrifyingly trashy slow-motion tragedy about an addicted, abusive filmmaker (Harvey Keitel) and how his assorted personal calamities end up bleeding into his professional life. A similar out-of-control quality defines the Matthew Modine and Dennis Hopper-starring oddity “The Blackout,” another spectacular tale of self-annihilation where Abel’s own extremities are on full display. Other works from around this period that merit mention are “R Xmas,” a solid, if somewhat prosaic (by Abel’s standards) drug-world caper that gets a boost via a soulful performance from rapper Ice T, and also “Go-Go Tales,” which might be tied with “Siberia” for Ferrara’s most purely out-there movie.

Ferrara is also an accomplished and versatile documentary filmmaker with style all his own: “Chelsea On The Rocks,” a wistful recollection of the hell-raising glory days of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, is a Playlist favorite, though we’re also partial to “Napoli Napoli Napoli,” an empathic look at the grubbier side of criminal/prison culture, and quotidian life in modern-day Naples. “Mulberry St.” is mostly a fun, street-level hangout movie; we’re also fans of “The Projectionist,” a character profile on Times Square movie theater manager Nick Nicolau that’s also a fond remembrance of the Big Apple’s bygone movie houses and erstwhile smut-cinema scene.

Ferrara earned some of his most effusive critical praise in years with the release of 2014’s terse and agonizing “Welcome To New York,” which tells of the spectacular fall of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn after he raped a maid in his hotel suite (Gerard Depardieu is arguably more bovine than man as DSK, and the parallels are rendered all the more upsetting when one remembers that Depardieu himself also been accused of sexual assault). “Siberia,” which saw a release earlier this year, is Ferrara’s gloriously unwound death-metal dream odyssey with Mr. Dafoe once again riding shotgun; the film’s production was chronicled in the breezy “Sportin’ Life,” an hourlong Ferrara doc funded in part by Yves St. Laurent.

“Zeros and Ones” is available now in limited release, digital platforms and VOD.