Outlaw
July 4, 2007
Let’s get one thing straight to begin with; I have a major problem with Danny ‘hard-man’ Dyer. What the fuck is this guy doing in films, he should stick to hanging around his local ‘east-end’ newsagents with his mates drinking Tropical Reef...
Vengeance is Mine
May 17, 2007
Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979) is based on a novel by Ryuzo Saki which was inspired by the real-life story of a serial killer. According to the booklet that accompanies the DVD, Imamura spent a year researching the facts of the case and uncovered...
La haine
May 11, 2007
La Haine (1995) is a blistering howl of dissent chronicling the disenfranchised minorities living in the projects just outside of Paris. Mathieu Kassovitz’s film sheds light on the unemployed youth and the pointlessness of their existence. We normally...
Smokin’ Aces
April 17, 2007
Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie have pretty much cornered the market on the ultraviolent, pop culture-laden crime film. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell filmmaker Joe Carnahan who follows up Narc (2002), his ode to gritty police procedurals of...
Payback Straight Up: The Director’s Cut
April 12, 2007
When Payback was originally released in 1999, it was surrounded by a bit of controversy when it was reported that the studio was not happy with writer/director Brian Helgeland’s original cut and with Mel Gibson’s approval, the actor filmed a new third...
Brute Force
April 9, 2007
Jules Dassin brought his style of hard-hitting, unflinching realism to the prison melodrama genre as he depicts the harsh world behind bars in Brute Force (1947). The first shot of the prison is a low angle one looking up at a watch tower at night in...
Harsh Times
March 22, 2007
Once again Christian Bale disappears into another role, demonstrating how he is not afraid to play an unlikable character. Jim is certainly an amoral piece of work and Bale attacks the role with his customary gusto playing the character as a cocky, super-confident...
The Naked City
March 16, 2007
Producer Mark Hellinger was interested in making a crime movie in the same vein as Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) except that New York City would be the main character. His main writer, Malvin Wald, gave him a screenplay entitled Homicide and Arthur...
Coastlines
February 21, 2007
Victor Nunez may not be the most prolific filmmaker – he’s made five feature films in 28 years – but the ones that do exist are intimate portraits of characters in transition, often leaving a bad situation in the hopes of starting a new life. His...
Unknown
January 31, 2007
A man (Caviezel) wearing a jean jacket wakes up in a locked warehouse to find an unconscious man (Pantoliano) tied to a chair, another unconscious man (Sisto) hanging from an overhead walkway by a handcuffed arm and another man (Kinnear) lying out cold...
