Crime
Noah’s Barks pages relating to the crime genre.
-
Violent Cop
Visionary auteur Takeshi Kitano writes and stars in this film about a ‘Violent Cop.’ It’s less exciting than the title promises. (read more)
-
Touch of Evil
Touch of Evil is a gigantic, ruthless bore for the first half, making no effort to have an engaging hook: a murder mystery about a case where the victims or the crime itself don’t actually matter. The main story about a detective jurisdiction dispute lacks fire when Orson Welles’s jabs are minor and ignored by… (read more)
-
American History X
Some melodramatically emotional punches are thrown, but it’s necessary when trying to cover the slow, personal, lifetime-long induction of racism in only two hours. American History X (AHX) may not get into much past the surface, but it takes the alternate route of looking at that surface in its entirety. Instead of exposing racism by… (read more)
-
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
A Mexploitation of exploitations? It has to be Sam Peckinpah, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia poster makes both facts obvious. Warren Oates might want to be cool, but he’s an aging, poor bartender who lives in squalor with his prostitute lover. Problems aren’t solved with a bullet and a laugh this time… (read more)
-
Dirty Harry
Let’s just forget about The French Connection and reevaluate Dirty Harry instead. What we have here isn’t just a film that broke boundaries in how much of the crime world media was allowed to show, but a blueprint for a taut, tough, crime-thriller for any generation. Instead of dealing with faceless drug deals we get… (read more)
-
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a John Cassavetes character study where a strip club owner is caught between his personal motivations and a mob hit job. Ben Gazzara puts on a fantastically subtle performance and hides his true feelings until the end. However, his character really only faces challenge, not conflict, and this… (read more)
-
The Usual Suspects
Just knowing there’s a twist is bad enough. Why can’t people just keep their damn mouths shut? After all, The Usual Suspects is a lesson in such. Thanks to some very impressive editing, the exposition itself feels like the action. Which is good because that’s most of the movie. While the ending is indeed great,… (read more)
-
Once Upon a Time in America
I want to love Once Upon a Time in America (OUaTiA). Sergio Leone‘s sense of scale and ability to capture the landscape have not diminished at all, and there’s a great basic story here with a very cool generational progression, but at times the acting is extremely poor for such a major feature, and the… (read more)
-
Le Samouraï
With Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville crafts a minimalist noir where absolute silence is golden, a foil to the heavy use of grey tones that cast dark, foreboding clouds over the slow proceedings. Possibly the most beautiful film of the ’60s, every scene takes place in real-time as if a natural coil is slowly wrapping around… (read more)
-
Drunken Angel
Shockingly (or perhaps not), Toshirô Mifune delivers one of his best performances in his first Akira Kurosawa-directed film. Takashi Shimura is his equal here and seeing the two Kurosawa legends interact so closely at the top of their games is a real treat, not to mention their narrative relationship as the elder doctor Shimura bluntly… (read more)