"I thought people like me were the legal system."

One of the seminal films of the 1990's...almost perfect as a stylistic exercise yet concurrently filled with such political commitment that it's simply overwhelming. Everything Ferrara hates is in this movie, including it's form which he criticizes in the commentary. "This is so uptight I can't even breathe. I'm glad I made this film because I would never make a film like this again. This is fascistic filmmaking." He's partially right, the film is incredibly tight, so tight that nearly every shot, every cut, every object has a specific purpose and function. It's some of the most "perfect" mis-en-scene I've ever witnessed, even down to the sheen on the wineglasses near…

Abel Ferrara's best looking film. It's a film of dualities.

The photography captures the contrasts of the decadence of elite Manhattanite dwellings to the filth of the streets. Ferrara's direction teases out the similarities between the two vastly different settings. Then he paints both worlds with a thick coat of sleaze and corruption.

Scenes are filled with well dressed men who suddenly explode into violence, their blood a fresh color on the grim tapestry of the city. The cops who are willing to bend and break the law. The crooks who clean up the streets by force. By the time it ends the moral lines have blurred.

Walken looks skeletal, ghostly. His face is gaunt and plastered with subtle expression.…

You could imagine during production that Abel Ferrara must have felt that his stylized neon saturated gangster film, complete with his biggest budget thus far, may prove to be his most mainstream and accessible feature, harking back as it did to the similar celluloid criminal mayhem that James Cagney would feature in in earlier days.

But upon its release in 1990, critics and audiences alike didn't see it that way at all. They gave it a resounding thumbs down, whilst some even booed the cast at screenings and demanded the profit went to drug rehab programmes in the titular city. Such reactions only further served the notoriety of Ferrara as an enfant terrible of American indie cinema scene. And so…

i never got away with anything.

Furious. Imagine seeing your mistakes in the toilet bowl every time you pissed, your own distorted face reflecting in the yellow-tinted not-enough-water just-been-dispatched fluid.

Ferrara often uses New York as a place for stories to launch from but never quite like this has the city become a catalyst for the head-splitting divide between situation and behavior or person and action or rise and fall. Violence has no real weight in the first half of this film ("ROOM SERVICE MOTHERFUCKERS!") mostly because violence has no gravitas or bearing on how the characters respond to their predicaments except as a dispensable/superfluous action in order to elevate the false facade of status they present to the rest…

Among the few likeable things about this movie are Christopher Walken's elegant performance, as well as that of a young, loquacious Laurence Fishburne (or Larry, as he is credited here, indicating how old this movie really is) and bit-parts from Wesley Snipes, David Caruso and, for about five minutes, Steve Buscemi. Perhaps the best part of the movie is its opening sequence, juxtaposing a spiky, firecracker dialogue scene between street-level gangsters (using colourful hip-hop language) with an almost operatic, Godfather-esque introduction to Walken's character, and then converging them brilliantly to close the first ten minutes of the film.

From there, though, the movie is scattershot, often not able to decide where it wishes to keep its focus. Walken, despite being…

Though I’ve seen just two of Abel Ferrara’s films (Bad Lieutenant and now King of New York), his thematic goals seem clear to me: eschewing the central character’s progression for the development of the seedy world that enshrouds him. While Bad Lieutenant contains these elements, King of New York is the sharper example of the two—an extended prison sentence does nothing to dim Frank White’s (Christopher Walken) lust for power as he emerges from jail stoic and focused, prepared to reclaim New York’s criminal world. He finds himself in a city overrun by slimy fat cats, many of whom have swarmed to his old turf and rackets, feasting on the leftovers of what he started before getting locked up. Unfazed,…