Modern Girls (1986)

Often described as L.A.’s answer to After Hours, Modern Girls (1986) feels much more indebted to the success of Desperately Seeking Susan as both are fuelled by a non-stop new wave soundtrack and boho club fashions. Taking place over the course of one night (a personal favourite sub-genre of mine), Modern Girls follows a quartet […]

Morning Patrol (1987)

“The stupidest question anyone on Earth could ask: where the hell has everybody gone?” All the woman (Michele Valley) says she has is a coat and a knife. The world has fallen into dystopia and no-one can remember why. The countryside is littered with abandoned vehicles and detritus. Scavengers ride around in motorcycles. In the […]

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 […]

Apartment Zero (1988)

Two roommates in Buenos Aires getting to know each other over breakfast, the British owner of the apartment, Adrian DeLuc (Colin Firth) asks the new American tenant, Jack Carney (Hart Bochner), “Do you like cinema?” The film, Apartment Zero (1988), then cuts to an exterior shot of the cinema that Adrian runs, Adrian and Jack […]