Miller’s Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother’s “best” movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it’s hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most elaborate and dense movie, both […]

The reason that there are two wildly different versions of the 1990 film Revenge is a great deal more interesting than the movie itself, for from the title on down it is but a meanly typical and pedestrian early-’90s erotic thriller whose chief point of significance is that, 14 years before Man on Fire, director […]

There’s a movie that Gangster Squad wants to be, and it would be so wonderful if it had managed to carry it off: clearly, there was a point where the intent was to make a movie according to all the very best clichés and worn-out tropes of a 1940s crime movie – the film being […]

The evergreen “crisis of masculinity” story doesn’t necessarily come with a baked-in disadvantage – some of the truly great films of all time have been dissections of male self-identity under stress – but it also comes with a certain “prove it to me” mark against it, for the same reason. We’ve just had so many […]

There isn’t really any legitimate reason for Lawless not to be a great movie; but it isn’t. It’s a good movie, and that in and of itself is nothing to sniff at; but not a great one, not like it should be. The pedigree is right: director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave reuniting, seven […]

It is frequently proposed that Some Like It Hot is the best movie comedy ever made, and those looking for an iconoclastic opinion on this front will, I am afraid, need to look elsewhere. For it is the best movie comedy of all time, says I, and only partially because it is the funniest. Which […]

Once Upon a Time in America was the most hard-fought film of Sergio Leone’s career. He turned his attention towards adapting Harry Grey’s partially autobiographical mobster novel The Hoods at the very beginning of the 1970s, but a combination of rights issues, financing, and the sheer damn scope of the thing meant that 13 years […]

Being a concerned friend, when Mark Kreutzer donated to the Carry On Campaign, it was with the express intent of filling a terrible gap in my 1980s romantic-comedy education. To which I can only say that I now owe him a debt of gratitude; for quite a gap it was, and glad I am to […]

You’ve seen the story of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet before: a poor kid ends up in jail and meets a grizzled old mobster, who becomes mentor and teacher to the budding criminal; as a result, the kid becomes a tremendously successful crimelord himself. It’s the basic arc of essentially every gangster movie ever made, and […]

The first thing I must get off my chest: if Public Enemies demonstrates anything, it’s that Michael Mann’s infatuation with high-definition video is becoming quite diabolical. When he used digital cameras to shoot Collateral, it made sense and it worked tremendously well; when he did the same for Miami Vice, it at the very least […]

The 1966 gangster film Tokyo Drifter is an admitted influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and it is good to be precise about that phrasing, since once you’ve admitted that something is an influence, you can no longer be accused of flat-out plagiarism. For the influence is, shall we say, not all that […]

For the 52nd and final review in my yearlong journey through the They Shoot Pictures Top 1000, I decided it was time to shake things up a bit. Inscrutable art films and dreary social dramas are all right, but we’re going out with a bang: a nasty, occasionally sleazy British gangster picture starring a young […]