Directed by Abel Ferrara • 1993 • United States, Italy
Starring Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo

One of outsider auteur Abel Ferrara’s most daring, emotionally raw forays into the depths of human torment, DANGEROUS GAME is a fascinatingly fractured, self-reflexive vision of moviemaking as a personal exorcism wrenched from the soul. Harvey Keitel stands in for Ferrara, playing Eddie Israel, a hedonistic, perpetually faithless New York City filmmaker who leaves behind his rocky relationship with his wife to direct a film in Los Angeles about, it just so happens, a deteriorating marriage. Soon, Israel and his leading lady (Madonna, in perhaps her finest and most fearless acting moment) are sleeping together and, amid emotional outbursts and increasingly intense rehearsals, the lines between reality and artifice all but dissolve.