"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…

Drug lord Frank White (Christopher Walken) is being released from prison and he immediately heads back to the street to pick up where he left off. Before he even gets into his car he's ordered that two rival drug dealers be taken care of. Back at his lavished hotel we get to meet Franks posse, which is mostly young black men who he picked up off the streets to work for him. Just looking at the place there's no question Frank is loaded with money but he's certainly not ready for retirement.

For some reason while in prison Frank got rehabilitated but that doesn't mean he can't kill or butcher those he wants. Instead, he sees his rival gangs as…

"You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now it's my turn."

A portrait of a crumbling city, one that seem to be reoccurring in Ferrara's films. It is not a coincidence that Frank White's first real welcoming by the city is from above, presented in an absolutely beautiful shot of the city lights reflecting onto him. While his penthouse suite could position his dominance over the low-lives and scum that he regularly surrounds himself with in the city below, it is (as previously stated) a reflection, putting him on the same level as it. He himself is doomed from the very start, the network he is working to create bleeding dry. His intentions are undeniably noble but…

One of the very best performances of Christopher Walken's career, and a film dripping in the dirty late 80s essence of the New York City streets, a nihilistic Robin Hood who perhaps isn't quite as layered or altruistic as he believes he is. In case you forgot, Christopher Walken is a phenomenal actor when he cares, able to convey a sense of subtle weariness one moment and explosive anger the next. It's no surprise how many gangsta rappers have quoted and idolized his Frank White, he's an effortlessly cool madman who'd just as soon help construct a hospital for the low income neighborhoods as he would flood them with drugs, a duality not dissimilar from the infamous Pablo Escobar.

Walken…