214 Best Releases From the Genre Crime (Page 9)
Mare of Easttown
Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance. Continue Reading →
Green Room
Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s serrated razor thriller that follows luckless punk band’s attempt to survive an assault by murderous neo-Nazis, is five years old (six counting its appearance at Cannes). Watching it in 2021 is a different experience compared to watching it in 2016. It’s bittersweet to take in Anton Yelchin’s terrific lead turn as bassist Pat, given his death in a horrific freak accident that year. It’s bitter to know that empty creeps like Tucker Carlson would look at Patrick Stewart’s neo-Nazi crime lord Darcy and his band of openly fascist, hate-fueled, racist goons and say “they’re doing nothing wrong” to their nationwide audience.The world shifts, and with it the experience of partaking in culture. But, while that shifting is inevitable, Green Room remains Green Room. In other words? It’s a terrific thriller that uses its geography and its carnage smartly. It handles tone precisely. And in Yelchin and Stewart, it has two stupendous performances that anchor a strong ensemble cast and contrast each other in fascinating ways.After a prologue that introduces struggling punk band the Ain’t Rights (Yelchin’s Pat – the bassist; Alia Shawkat’s Sam – the drummer; Callum Turner’s Tiger – the vocalist; and Joe Cole’s Reece – the drummer) and their dire circumstances (an unexpectedly cancelled gig strands them states away from home, and taking a last minute gig at a right-wing skinhead club’s a way to get some badly needed cash), Green Room confines itself mostly to the title location and the club that surrounds it. Director/writer Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter (20th Century Women) turn the setting into a tightly packed box of nightmares.Barring a brief, transcendent moment during the Ain’t Rights’ show itself – a moment in the zone where the band gel and the rancid crowd get over themselves, the set and its presentation are consistently and deliberately stifling. Sometimes, this is literally true – as when the band are playing or early in the stand-off where they’re locked in the packed green room with a murdered woman, her best friend (Imogen Poots’ Amber), the white supremacist black metal band whose leader murdered her, and the club’s mountain of a bouncer (Eric Edelstein). Continue Reading →
Rumble Fish
“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see, when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. You know. The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got? I got thirty-five summers left." Think about it. Thirty-five summers.” Continue Reading →
The Godfather Part II
What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s. Continue Reading →
The Conversation
Not many artists have stretches of greatness so profound that they transcend their medium. They’re not looked at as just a musician or athlete or director, but part of the fabric of modern pop culture at a particular time. What The Beatles meant to the 1960s, or what Michael Jordan meant to the 1990s, is how Francis Ford Coppola defined the 1970s. Continue Reading →
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover event on April 1st will mark not only the premiere of a new Law & Order spinoff, but also the return of one Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). For the first 12 seasons of SVU Stabler and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) were the SVU team, the perfect partners. Continue Reading →
Owning Mahowny
Dan Mahoney (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn’t want to win anything – he just wants to gamble. He drives a shabby car, wears a cheap suit, and lives with a woman he clearly doesn’t love. Most of his life is just a front – Mahoney maintains his appearance as a respectable, up-and-coming bank manager to facilitate his destructive hobby, even as a bookie barges into his office to collect the ten grand Dan owes. From the moment we meet him until Owning Mahoney’s final frame, he has no endgame. He just wants to bet. Continue Reading →
#Horror
The remaining festival offerings in horror are satisfyingly gory, but some fall short in plot & characterization.
(This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.)
After a strong beginning, South by Southwest’s “Midnighters” category wraps up with more ecohorror, an animated fantasy epic, and yet more small town folks acting weird. Gorehounds will be pleased to know that over the top violence seems to be making a comeback in horror, if some of the films featured here are any indication. Regrettably, in some cases it’s at the cost of a cohesive, fleshed out plot. Continue Reading →
墮落天使
In Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, we follow two parallel narratives. One tells the story of a contract killer (Leon Lai) trying to get out of the game and his agent (Michelle Reis) who is infatuated with him. The other follows a chaotic and mute man, He Zhwiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who falls in love with a woman called Charlie (Charlie Yeung) whom he keeps running into. There’s a lot to like here, from the moodiness of Hong Kong to the music, to Wong Kar-wai’s signature stunning lighting. One specific thing which is really fascinating here is how few moments of dialogue are present here, and how that makes this film so effective. Continue Reading →
Au revoir là-haut
SimilarAlex Strangelove (2018), The Party (1980), The Party 2 (1982),
Two old flames reuniting, a harried nursing home worker, and Dante Basco's family affair mark SXSW's Narrative Spotlight.
(This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.)
One year ago, the idea of doing a virtual version of the South by Southwest film festival would have sounded like an insurmountable task. Now, it’s just one more piece of “normal” life that we take for granted. For the second year in a row, SXSW has gone online and though that’s led to a lot of changes, that hasn’t altered the fact that the festival is still home to distinctly-rendered indie projects. Some of those films can be found in the Narrative Spotlight section of the festival, which kicked off with a trio of titles, including See You Then. Continue Reading →
阿飛正傳
Watching any Wong Kar-wai movie in 2021 hits differently than it might have in almost any other year. He’s a director known for exploring loneliness and to watch it at a time when all of us without question are among the loneliest we’ve ever been is a striking experience. We’re now a year into a pandemic and despite the vaccinations on the horizon, it feels like it has no end. We’re counting the time since we last hugged or kissed our loved ones in months and even years at this point instead of hours. Continue Reading →
からみ合い
In Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance, Julian, a young Black man played by Eric Lockley, inherits a house from his grandmother and turns it into a commune. What follows is a struggle to find consensus in a communal house that weaves documentary detail about the radical past with the present to try and find a new radical path for Black liberation. What we get is stuffed with powerful imagery that tries to get at this noble aim, but doesn’t manage to convert all those brilliant ideas into a coherent final product. Continue Reading →
旺角卡門
Back in 1988, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai tried his hand at directing a feature film, transitioning from soap opera screenwriting to the low-level crime underworld seen in As Tears Go By. Wong’s debut drama follows three characters with multiple storylines: Wah (Andy Lau), his cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung), and Fly (Jackie Cheung), his stand-in little brother in criminal life. Around the age of 30, Wong’s first foray into directing landed him a critical and modest commercial success, blending elements of his style that would become staples in his own filmmaking style. Continue Reading →
Good Girls
In the first three episodes of Season 4 provided to critics, Good Girls one begins to feel a creeping sense of the same. The “girls”—Ruby (Retta), Beth (Christina Hendricks), and Annie (Mae Whitman)—are still jockeying for power with Rio (Manny Montana). Beth is finding herself, once more, in a sexually charge situation with a known felon—this time a hired killer named Mr. Fitzpatrick (Andrew McCarthy)—while her husband Dean (Matthew Lillard) is left in the dark in that and so many other ways. Ruby and Stan’s (Reno Wilson) child, this time their son, is getting in trouble, the kind of trouble their criminal endeavors make both easier and harder to deal with. A zealous federal agent, Phoebe Donnegan (Lauren Lapkus), is closing in on them all, too. Continue Reading →
Crisis
In the late '90s, pharmaceutical companies claimed that the opioids that they produced weren’t addictive, causing a spike in medical providers prescribing them. This claim was, of course, false, and the influx of people who became addicted to opioids has created a public health crisis that results in an economic burden of $7.85 billion a year. Even worse is the human cost. In 2018, 67,367 Americans were killed via drug overdose. Of that number 69.5% of those deaths were caused by Opioids- mainly synthetic opioids. Continue Reading →
Money for Nothing
If I told you that thirty years ago, 1.2 million dollars literally fell out of an armored truck, would you believe me? To be clear, this money wasn’t stolen – at least, not initially. A Purolator Armored Services truck – carrying an enormous quantity of cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia – suffered an “equipment malfunction,” leaving 1.2 million dollars lying on the side of the road in South Philly. As 1993’s Money For Nothing will tell you, this cash was quickly discovered by Joey Coyle (John Cusack), an out-of-work twenty-something. What does one do next? Continue Reading →
Cherry
Cleveland. The early 2000s. A young man (Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z) falls in love with a girl named Emily (Ciara Bravo, Wayne). It’s lovely but fraught. When she wants to go to college in Canada, he impulsively signs up for the Army. Life as a medic in the Iraq War is traumatizing, and the young man processes that trauma poorly. Drug use becomes addiction, and Emily joins him. A loathsome drug dealer (Jack Reynor, Midsommar) becomes a hated enemy and a desperate friend. Bank robbery starts to look like a good idea. The spiral devours all. Continue Reading →
Tell Me Your Secrets
I am a great lover of camp media. I love the over-the-top, the ridiculous, the melodramatic, and the ostentatious. I love storytelling that delves so far into the extremes of the human experience that it departs from reality altogether. Unfortunately, camp can backfire, and when it doesn’t work, it can become so ridiculous that it’s hard to watch. Continue Reading →
Тайны следствия
The death of the brilliant, award-winning Swedish journalist Kim Wall made a worldwide headline in 2017, mostly because the details of her murder were so gruesome that it almost felt like a work of fiction. But in Tobias Lindholm’s The Investigation — a grim six-part miniseries based on the killing of Kim Wall — the brutality of that crime is never the main focus. Instead of trying to exploit the drama behind this tragedy, Lindholm chooses to focus on the other side of the story: the hard work and determination shown by the team of police who worked together to seek the justice that Kim Wall and her family deserved to have. Continue Reading →
Wild Indian
Watch afterThe Whale (2022),
The Michael Greyeyes-starring Sundance debut announces Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. as an exciting new filmmaker.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.)
The never-ending cycle of violence and abuse is at the center of Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s directorial debut Wild Indian. Part drama thriller and part character study of historical and generational trauma, Wild Indian announces Corbine as an exciting new voice. His vision is bold, confidently going to places that are dark and unconventional, with a masterful cinematic language often only found in the works of a seasoned filmmaker. His writing is airless, tightening the tension of the story up to eleven. It’s a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Continue Reading →