Humiliated after an undercover sting goes wrong, live on TV, the Hong Kong police take PR matters into their own hands. They wire shock troops with cameras and tip-off local media, leading to a series of tense stand-offs and shootouts that are lensed like Johnnie To movies. Suffice to say the real winners in this cat-and-mouse game of cops-and-crooks are: the viewers at home!
Extremely odd movie about an outlaw, left-for-dead by a pardner, who returns one day to strike up a pedophilic relationship with his teenage stepdaughter. Also, the partner's name is "Dad." Paging Dr....uh....the law!
Some gorgeous California backdrops, with lots of waves crashing against the sand. As the reformed bandit-cum-sheriff, Malden is menacing, and very hungover. Slim Pickens is also a leering old coot. And Pina Pellicer, as the daughter, logs a wonderfully subtle, tender performance.
But it's impossible to overstate…
With Schindler's List, Spielberg was famously taken to task (by Godard, Haneke, and a great many others) for Hollywood-ifying the Holocaust. He was, they claimed, bundling gross historical tragedy as entertainment. Glazer's film almost feels like a reaction to this. If it is aberration to depict such horrors with recourse to mainstream cinematic convention, then surely the opposite track--trading in tropes of the art gallery, and what can vaguely be termed "the art film" (or, less generously, the "A24 movie")--constitutes…
I'm no expert. But I can count on three fingers the American fiction films released in my lifetime that attempt to understand the indigenous American experience, and interiority, with anything like insight. They are, chronologically:
1. Dead Man
2. The New World
3. Killers of the Flowers Moon
The "twist" ending was absolutely brilliant: an acknowledgement (some may call it a cop-out) by Scorsese (literally by Scorsese) that, for all its detail and comion and genuine desire (from production to…
