When Jean Renoir set out to make The Rules of the Game, his fascinating account of the two radically different sides of a high-society rendezvous, one has to wonder whether he knew he was inadvertently setting the standard for an entire sub-genre of media that has remained omnipotent to the present day. One of the…

At this point in his career, Steven Soderbergh has managed to work in nearly every conceivable genre available to him, jumping from domestic dramas to darkly comical satires to harrowing psychological horrors, and managing to accomplish great work under each of them. However, some of his best films fall under the crime genre, and whether…

If there was ever a lesson to be learned from crime films made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was that crime doesn’t pay. It was incredibly rare to find a film focused on a criminal that ends with them getting away with the crime, or at least not facing some consequences as a…

Gangster films are a polarizing form of artistic expression – for some, they’re predictable forms of entertainment that don’t offer much outside of the bare minimum, while for others, they’re the epitome of enjoyment, fascinating glimpses into the machinations of the criminal mind. In the years before film noir was at its peak, there was…

“We didn’t solve anything – we just picked up the pieces” Perception is an important part of understanding a film, which has never been clearer than in those that blur the boundaries not only between genres, but between entire conceptual frameworks. Basil Dearden’s Sapphire is one that can be seen in two ways – the…

When it comes to going with the most simple approach with filmmaking, Hollywood took a while to adjust, especially during the era in which cinema was still quite new and revolutionary, and every film was considered to be a crucial step towards normalizing it as the dominant form of literature in a world slowly being…

Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) has only known peculiarity – named after a homeless man who came into a large fortune, her life has been anything but conventional. It doesn’t help that her parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) have made a living as con artists, with their livelihood coming in fleecing any unsuspecting victim,…

What do you get when you combine Nicolas Cage at the peak of his descent into over-acting (and his gradual realization of his reputation, and the subsequent relishing in it), Willem Dafoe at his most excessive and Paul Schrader’s unhinged vision of crime and violence? The answer is Dog Eat Dog, the bewildering dark comedy…

John (Willem Dafoe) doesn’t have much direction in life – he’s in the throes of middle-age, and all he’s known as been drugs. He used to be an addict, but has now gotten clean, but still does work as a dealer and delivery man for Ann (Susan Sarandon), his glamorous supplier, who services the elite…

Mrs Wong (Tsai Chin), more commonly known as Nai-Nai (“grandmother”) is an ordinary elderly, chain-smoking immigrant woman residing in the Chinatown neighbourhood of New York City. She has been widowed for some years, and as a result has passed the time engaging in a variety of activities, such as weekly consultations with a fortune-teller and…