Any film that reserves the prestigious “and” credit for cultural icon Cardi B is going to instantly be something special. Naturally, Hustlers is not only an extremely entertaining film, but it is also one of the most unique cinematic experiences of the year, a hilarious and irreverent crime story that takes every opportunity it is…

“We lived in utter loneliness, neither here nor there” These words are spoken by Holly (Sissy Spacek), as she watches her boyfriend, Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) stand in the wilderness just outside South Dakota, in quiet contemplation. We find ourselves, like the characters, in the rural regions of the Southern United States sometime in the…

I do wish I knew what Sidney Lumet was trying to do with Serpico, but from the looks of it, not even he was entirely sure. Most definitely not a bad film by any means (in fact, it has moments of excellence consistently throughout), but rather one caught between genres and tonal shifts, whereby it…

Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private detective operating out of Los Angeles. He is a fiercely independent investigator, choosing to work by himself rather than choosing to get a job at an agency, even though he is frequently pursued to lend his services to the “information factories” as he calls them. His latest case…

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…