The shadow of Casablanca loomed large over Hollywood in the mid-1940s. The radical success of that iconic film was frequently a source of a lot of active efforts to recapture the same spirit of the wartime romance between Rick Blaine and Ilse Lund, so much so that it became a minor genre all on its…
Category: Crime
Plainclothes (2025)
There is something to be said about the most dangerous people being those hiding in plain sight. These seemingly friendly strangers cross our paths randomly, but secretly have ulterior motives, which contributes to the belief that there are some people whose entire purpose is to cause trouble or expose those whom they view as being…
Dead Man’s Wire (2025)
Sometimes we come across a story that truly embodies the adage that reality is often stranger than fiction. This is perfectly represented in the case of Tony Kiritsis, a mild-mannered man living in Indianapolis, beloved by his community and respected by all those he encountered in his daily life. However, after feeling wronged by the…
Ballad of a Small Player (2025)
Ghosts tend to follow us around. Whether we take such a sentiment as a literal description of the supernatural, or simply view it as a metaphorical idea about the inability to escape the past depends on each person, but it’s a relatively universal idea at its core. This is something that Lawrence Osborne explored in…
Prizzi’s Honor (1985)
There’s a concept that tends to emerge in media from time to time, which is the idea that someone realises their life is in danger, but the person they fear is not some foreboding stranger, but rather someone very close to them, whether it’s a family member or lover. We’ve seen a few works over…
God’s Pocket (2014)
Culture cannot exist without community. A population can only become something meaningful if everyone within it comes together to form a group that functions as a single collective, consisting of many different stories that weave together to create a vibrant tapestry of humanity. Many artists have explored the power of community as not only a…
The Mastermind (2025)
We all crave success, in whatever form it tends to take – for some, it’s a thriving career, others it’s an enormous amount of wealth (although the two aren’t mutually exclusive), and in some cases, it can be even more abstract. This has often been a source of conversation in the works of Kelly Reichardt,…
Bloody Mama (1970)
For nearly a century, we have been enraptured by the story of “Ma” Kate Barker – and whether we hear of her story through detailed accounts of her criminal career, or through the song by Boney M that immortalised her within the culture, she has become a figure of American folklore, a fascinating individual whose…
Willie Dynamite (1973)
Much like any art form, cinema is usually crafted as a response to the social and cultural milieux in which a particular artist exists, which means that we usually find every film contains some degree of commentary, even if only in the most subtle cues. We usually find that crime films in particular contain the…
Riff Raff (2025)
They say blood is thicker than water – but very few of us should find ourselves in a situation where we discover this to be quite literally true. It is also the foundation of Riff Raff, in which Dito Montiel, working from a screenplay by John Pollono, goes in search of answers relating to this…
The Postmodern Pelican 