Neo Noir
-
THE INCIDENT (Dir. Larry Peerce, 1967, US)
* * * In Larry Peerce’s harrowing thriller, The Incident (1967), a cross-section of native New Yorkers finds themselves confined in a subway car, facing a veritable nightmare as two malevolent street hoodlums turn the mundane journey into a claustrophobic crucible. Tony Musante, and a young, sinister Martin Sheen, whom we first encounter menacingly prowling Continue reading
-
A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (Dir. Jan Egleson, 1990, US)
* * * * Director Jan Egleson must have been taking careful notes when he was watching Get Carter because this is a work that is constructed deliciously around the cold dead eyes of Michael Caine which pierces through every frame. Egleson glances into the cutthroat mischief of the corporate world in which the suits Continue reading
-
PARINDA (Dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989, India)
At times watching Parinda is like seeing the handiwork of a geographer dissecting the topography of an urban landscape, flattening and amplifying the fissures of a Bombay milieu that had typically never been printed on celluloid in quite the way director Vidhu Vinod Chopra and his cinematographer Binod Pradhan had in mind when they were Continue reading
-
COBRA (Dir. George P. Cosmatos, 1986, US) – Genre slippages
Growing up, Cobra was one of those cinematic anomalies in the career of mainstream Hollywood action star Sylvester Stallone, a blip that was drowned out by the summer of 1986 in which Top Gun and Aliens projected fascistic rumblings, dreaming of an infantile militarized Americana. Although Cobra did decent business at the box office, the Continue reading
-
UGLY (Anurag Kashyap, 2013, India)
Director Anurag Kashyap really knows how to cast his films, finding actors (rather than working with stars) with the right level of anxiety in their faces, inculcating a strange volatility in the audience. Ugly could almost be a companion piece to Peddlers, a film produced by Kashyap and which is stuck in distribution hell with Continue reading
Movie Mahal 