By the mid-80s, directors were starting to yearn for ever more extravavant modes of cinematic excess. In the realm of comedy, even the most extreme farce wasn’t enough, propelling a new wave of violent romantic antagonism comedies that fused sensation and laughter as viscerally as possible. Ruthless People was one of these exercises – in its darkly comic inversion of the Getty and Hearst abduction narratives; in the cartoony violence that percolates through every scene, and that sees one of…
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Babylon 2022
Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s sprawling magnum opus, is a riotous affirmation that cinema is still a maximalist medium – and always has been since its inception. While not a direct adaptation of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, it revels in the same larger-than-life vision of the Los Angeles film industry as the perverse pleasure-principle of the American unconscious. At close to three hours and a quarter in length, it’s also a tribute to the unrivalled majesty and sublimity of set pieces on…
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12 Angry Men 1997
Although Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film may be the most famous version, 12 Angry Men actually started out as a teleplay, which Reginald Rose subsequently adapted for the theatre and cinema. Released in 1997, William Friedkin’s telemovie aims to get back to that original moment, if only to open up the story for a new generation. To that end, he more or less discards Lumet’s immaculate tracking-shots and unbroken takes, replacing them with a loose, languorous Steadicam that rides the waves…
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The Wolf of Wall Street 2013
The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the bestselling memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), which describes how he became one of the richest people in America through sustained security fraud. One of Belfort’s most prominent strategies was to sell worthless stocks to inexperienced customers – in effect, to sell nothing to nobodies – meaning that it was a career that subsisted less on providing goods than in raising the process of circulation itself to a fever pitch. As…
