Place Vendôme (1998)

Place Vendôme (1998) fits the bill for French neo-noir in that the key female characters are glamorous blondes while the men are all weathered looking mutts. The cinematography feels very 1990s “movie for adults” in the dark hues of the interiors, and its overall polished feeling, reminiscent of a Grisham or Le Carre adaption from […]

Silent Trigger (1996)

Dreaming about a YouTube ambient video titled, “Meditating with Dolph Lundgren in his high rise building sniper’s nest while raining.” While Silent Trigger (1996) is an action movie that gives fans what they want – Dolph using a massive sniper rifle to take down masked mercenaries who are toting sub-machine guns – it also aims […]

Variety (1983)

A young white woman sitting in a ticket booth for a porno theatre. The key image to Variety (1983) that I had in my head before watching it. New York city in its grimy, sleazy prime. “The old New York” is an idea that has been mythologised into nostalgia, often calcified (HBO’s The Deuce, for […]

Violent Cop (1989)

A brawl in the street in slow motion. Cop and gangster wrestling on the pavement in front of neighbourhood boys frozen as bystanders. Mellow jazz scoring the violent image of a baseball bat striking down upon a cop’s head, resulting in a geyser of blood spatter. A chase results, and continues by foot and by […]

First Name: Carmen (1984)

Jean-Luc Godard in the 1980s is terrain I’ve always wanted to investigate. The French auteur coming back to narrative movies after the 1970s, retaining his experimentation and politics, and constantly assessed by reference to his fertile 1960s heyday aka “the fun stuff.” First Name: Carmen (1984) was the first from this 80s period that I […]