Confession time: when I first came up with the idea for this whole big Michael Mann retrospective, there was one overriding motivation for it. See, I was super-excited for the impending Public Enemies, but I couldn’t really explain why. “You have no reason to be enthusiastic for a Mann film,” I told myself. “You liked […]

I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out exactly what Away We Go proves: -that Sam Mendes has no facility for directing comedy? -that when Sam Mendes is a remarkable chameleon able to shed lovely, high-budget prestige pictures for scruffy, quirky independent dramedies without bringing any trace of the one subgenre to the […]

It would be quite inaccurate to say that I loved the new Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; it’s a bit of a stretch to even say that I liked it. But I did find it to be frequently entertaining and enjoyable in the way that sound and fury can be entertaining of a summer’s […]

Three years of silence followed the flat, tossed-off L.A. Takedown, in which Michael Mann wrote nothing, directed nothing, and produced very little – the longest period of inactivity in his career to that point. Then came 1992, and the release of what probably counts as the most atypical entry in Mann’s whole corpus: The Last […]

From among the Video Nasties As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, director Mario Bava – ex-cinematographer, one of the great color stylists of the ’60s and ’70s, and Italy’s best disciple of Alfred Hitchcock – largely invented all the rules of the giallo with 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and 1964’s Blood and Black Lace, […]

As I probably should have mentioned in reviewing Manhunter, Michael Mann didn’t just spend the 1980s directing movies – in fact, it’s probably the case that for half of the decade, he wasn’t even primarily thought of as a filmmaker. From 1984 until 1990, Mann was executive producer on the hugely popular TV cop show […]

I do not know what the Frenchest of all film genres is, but if I were invited to submit a shortlist, one of the candidates would surely be the ever-popular drama about a family that quietly tears itself apart through unspoken resentments and bitterness. In fact, the mere fact that I can casually refer to […]

And now we come to an important moment indeed in the development of Michael Mann’s directorial personality: his first experiment with film vocabulary. In this latter part of his career, he’s become famous – infamous, in some circles – for being an arch-stylist, which is a simpler way of saying that he likes to bend […]

It is a fact undeniable that raunchy comedy works, as humiliating as it can be to admit this sometimes. Chaucer knew this; Shakespeare knew this. A great many contemporary filmmakers also know this, though it hardly needs to be mentioned that very few of them are working at a level comparable to Chaucer or Shakespeare. […]

Take the loudmouthed idiot shtick of Will Ferrell, mix it with a family-friendly action adventure, force the combined concoction into a PG-13 frame that doesn’t do any favors to anyone, and just for fun, overlay the whole project with in-jokes referring back to a 1974 kid’s TV show that is only fondly remembered by the […]

In hindsight, knowing the kind of film that Michael Mann “ought” to make, The Keep seems like an inexplicably bizarre tangent for the future director of Heat and Collateral, wedged into his filmography like a square peg in a round hole to a degree that The Last of the Mohicans dares not even dream about. […]

If there’s one important thing to understand about the Italian giallo as a genre, it is that the “rules” of gialli are not prescriptive, like they are in the similar American slasher genre. You can pluck just about any slasher film out of a box, and describe in fairly close detail how the plot is […]