Action

Grant Nebel wrote:
Melancholic Screwball

Into the Night resembles a lot of other films of its time: the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours or what Miracle Mile would have been if that thing (you know the thing I mean) hadn’t happened. Moving forward, it’s Collateral with one character gender-switched and actually more gunplay, but its most interesting cinematic relative is Eyes Wide Shut. Let’s call it a second cousin: both films are about a man’s two-night journey after he realizes his wife’s infidelity (imagined in Eyes, real here) and more importantly, both take place in a city that’s not quite real. Kubrick created his own hallucination of New York for his film, but director John Landis and writer Ron Koslow had the advantage of making Into the Night in L. A., a city that’s always already part fiction.Read More »

Open-minded architect Paul Kersey returns to New York City from vacationing with his wife, feeling on top of the world. At the office, his cynical coworker gives him the welcome-back with a warning on the rising crime rate. But Paul, a bleeding-heart liberal, thinks of crime as being caused by poverty. However his coworker’s ranting proves to be more than true when Paul’s wife is killed and his daughter is raped in his own apartment. The police have no reliable leads and his overly sensitive son-in-law only exacerbates Paul’s feeling of hopelessness. He is now facing the reality that the police can’t be everywhere at once. Out of sympathy his boss gives him an assignment in sunny Arizona where Paul gets a taste of the Old West ideals. He returns to New York with a compromised view on muggers…Read More »

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Franz (B. Linda), a former officer of the Security Service disbanded in 1990, after verification, joins the police together with his colleagues. Abandoned by his wife, the daughter of a former deputy minister, he became bitter and distanced himself even more from women and the state. Working as a cop, attempts to stop a gang of car thieves lead to a tragedy, his colleagues die. Franz turns to his former Security Service friend for help. Soon, it turns out that Olo (M. Kondrat) most likely works for the criminals. The friends find themselves on opposite sides of the barricade, Franz’s young mistress crosses the line too. A cult film by Władysław Pasikowski, which met the expectations of the Polish audience and made Bogusław Linda, an outstanding actor of the cinema of moral anxiety, an icon of Polish cinema of the transformation period. Read More »

Inspired by Jacques Mesrine’s autobiographical book “L’Instinct de mort” – which he wrote in prison shortly before his magnificent final escape – Jean-François Richet’s fast-paced drama charts Mesrine’s rise from a wayward French soldier in Algeria to a bolder and bolder criminal on the streets of Paris. Mesrine’s outlaw odyssey even brought him to Canada, where he fell in with separatist radicals in Quebec. Thirty years after French police gunned him down in a spectacular shootout, his infamy lives on. Equal parts thriller and biopic, Mesrine remains faithful to its central character, a dynamic figure who is by no means a model protagonist.Read More »

The story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s public enemy No. 1 during the 1970s. An evocation of the his life, which traces the colorful career of this gangster called “the man with the hundred faces”. After nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats – from multiple bank robberies and to prison breaks – Mesrine was gunned down by the French police in Paris. The second episode of the Mesrine legend.Read More »

Children are being kidnapped and killed for the magical properties their blood is believed to contain. Two fathers, one of whom has been driven crazy from the loss of both his wife and daughter, and the other of which who believes his son is still alive, join together in an attempt at rescue and/or revenge. At the same time, the kidnapped children are planning their escape.Read More »

A tanker truck is blown to smithereens in the middle of a busy street, and a deadly viral infection is released with the explosion. The Bebop crew – Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine, and Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV – are instantly after the culprit when the gargantuan reward of 300,000,000 woolongs is announced. But the case gets stranger and stranger as the cold-blooded Vincent Volaju, who supposedly has been dead for ten years, seems to be the prime suspect. Meanwhile, Spike encounters the dangerous Electra, who too seeks the madman. Conspiracies and secrets better left alone are uncovered, and Vincent’s reign or terror is nowhere near over yet..Read More »

A guilt-haunted samurai warrior attempts to stop a massacre taking place.Read More »

An innocent man gets killed for the debt accumulated by his gambler son. This sets Okatsu, a master with the sword and an adopted daughter of the victim, on a path of revenge.Read More »