A commentator on this release calls this a minor Lang film, and maybe it is, but it's made with a taut understanding of the tension required in a wartime spy thriller. Ray Milland feels well-cast as a sort of bland everyman who falls into a mysterious Nazi spy ring plot -- not unlike, say, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much; indeed, the ordinary person happens upon bad goings on is a pretty common trope to cinema of this period,…
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Confess, Fletch 2022
What I like about this film is how amiable and low-key it is. It doesn't go for the big killer laughs, but it's a character-centred comedy thriller about a slightly dim private detective, excellently portrayed by Jon Hamm, who's never quite found the ideal role for his talents (since Mad Men) but this one feels pretty close to the kind of deft comedy he excels in. I can't say plotwise it was much above any mid-level 60s thriller, but the stakes are all fairly low and so it can coast by adequately on Hamm's charm.
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Urban Rashomon 2013
It seems to me that a lot of photographer/director Khalik Allah's work is about the ethics of documenting poverty. In this short piece we see him capturing images of a street person called Frenchie, while the director reflects in voiceover about his borderline exploitative relationship with his subject. It's a film of beautiful images but also is very upfront about the ways in which representation is manipulation and exploitation, which is refreshing.
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Vice 2018
In some ways, when I watch something like Vice (or indeed, writer/director Adam McKay's last film The Big Short), I think of David O. Russell's American Hustle or even the flashier Martin Scorsese of, say, Wolf of Wall Street, both of which films I broadly liked (although I'm cooling on the Russell over time). I think there's a lot of common ground, as comedic renderings of modern society in all its gaudiness and compromised politics, and perhaps there's a fine…
