Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) considers himself quite a renaissance man. He owns and operates The Crazy Horse West, a Los Angeles strip club, where he tries to shed the image of these institutions as being sordid, sleazy pits of debauchery, attempting to redefine the industry and put “entertain” back into “adult entertainment”. However, behind closed…

If any filmmaker deserved to be named the greatest of all time, Alfred Hitchcock would certainly not be a bad choice. There are so many reasons to revere him – his films were always of the highest standard, and his work spans from the silent era, right through to the latter stages of New Hollywood,…

Nicky (John Cassavetes) is a low-level heavy for a notorious New York City gangster. When a hit goes wrong, Nicky’s relationship with the mob becomes sour, and he develops the notion that he is going to be killed. Paranoid beyond belief, he calls the only person who can help him, Mikey (Peter Falk), who he…

Hamburg in the mid-1970s. Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a mild-mannered art Swiss art restoration expert and tradesman in frame-making. He is slowly dying from leukaemia, and intends to live out his days quietly and without trouble. Also in Hamburg at the same time is Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper), a mysterious American man who is…

A sub-genre that I have been recently exploring is that of the British true-crime thriller. These are differentiated from fictional works insofar as being equally as gritty (perhaps even more so), they tend to be a lot bleaker and arid than their most enthralling speculative counterparts. One of the most controversial of all of these…

In contemporary cinema, there are few names quite as exciting as David Lowery – a filmmaker who rose from relative obscurity a few years ago, evolving into one of modern cinema’s most talented auteurs, for a number of reasons, crafting exuberant masterpieces such as the gritty crime drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the exceptional philosophical…

Clint Eastwood, for better or for worse, has made a substantial impact on cinema, both as an iconic actor and as a director whose works span over five decades and include a number of significant accolades and positions within the canon of great American filmmaking. One could argue that Eastwood’s work is very much hit-and-miss,…

I was recently having quite a spirited discussion with a colleague of mine on the subject of serial killers, and we were both questioning precisely what is it that makes true crime stories so captivating? What is it about recountings of the grisly, gruesome crimes of other people that manages to be so alluring? From…