Crime

Harvard Film Archive writes:
One of the Coppola’s most overtly stylized works, Rumble Fish uses its breathtaking black and white, Koyanisqaatsi-inspired time-lapse photography and propulsive original score by The Police’s Stewart Copland to evoke a dream world of alienated youth. A beautiful postmodern art film, Rumble Fish is wonderfully uncertain of its time and place, stranding glittering icons of Fifties Americana – pool halls, flickering neon signs – within an Eighties post-industrial wasteland. The stylistic bricolage shapes the performances too, with Matt Dillon channeling Method Acting as a young man infatuated with the enigma of his self-absorbed brother, played with whispering intensity by a Marcel Camus-meets-Marlon Brando modeled Mickey Rourke. The late Dennis Hopper makes a poignant appearance as the absent even when present father who proves that the center inevitably cannot hold.Read More »

A story set in the back alleys and nightclubs of Beyoğlu among drag queens and prostitutes, pimps and hopeless lovers…

It shows all the dark corners of Beyoglu, Istanbul. Prostitutes, transexuals and their pimps are the protagonists of this movie, which is quite unlikely for a movie made in 1994. More strange thing is that the director creates a perfect atmosphere with real transsexuals, gay bars and night clubs.Read More »

The murder of a wealthy, much-married rancher (Lyle Talbot) in a posh Manhattan nightclub is the catalyst for The Falcon Out West. Amateur sleuth Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), aka The Falcon, deduces that the victim was killed with rattlesnake venom.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Retired military officer Richard Briand-Charmery, known to all as “The Commandant”, gambles every centime he has on horse racing bets. When his luck is down, he supplies his friends with false betting tips, knowing that the friend whose bet comes off will give him a fraction of the winnings. One day, Richard meets up with an old flame, Maud, and passes an evening with her at his expense. To pay the bill for the evening’s extravagance, the Commandant tries his scam on a naive restaurateur, Ripeux…’
– Films de FranceRead More »

Quote:
Aki Kaurismäki’s first feature, Crime And Punishment (1983), updated and transplanted Dostoyevsky’s novel to present day Finland. Since then, the deadpan auteur has written, directed and edited some 20 films, which is about a fifth of Finland’s cinematic output since the Eighties. His films, however, have always proven more popular abroad than at home. Apart from Britain, few nations like to see their own follies, iniquities and all-round miserabilism being paraded in affectionately mocking entertainments, and Kaurismäki’s focus is very much on the dark absurdities of his motherland’s down-and-outs, drunks and dispossessed.Read More »

Quote:
An adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, set in modern Helsinki. Slaughterhouse worker Rahikainen murders a man, and is forced to live with the consequences of his actions.

Aki Kaurismäki’s narrative directorial debut. He chose this project after reading François Truffaut’s interview with Alfred Hitchcock, where Hitchcock claimed Crime and Punishment was the one book he would never adapt, because “it would be to difficult.” Kaurismäki later admitted it was too difficult.Read More »

Quote:
In 1960s Germany, criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse uses hypnotized victims and the surveillance equipment of a Nazi-era bugged hotel to steal nuclear technology from a visiting American industrialist.Read More »

Synopsis:
A strange case baffles the police and the citizens of a German small town. A two-year old girl has disappeared. There are suspects, innocents, guilty ones and a web of lies. It’s saturday afternoon, and Achim’s parents are invited for a topping-out ceremony. The neighbour’s daughter, Monika (Renate Roland), is the babysitter for Achim (Sascha Urchs) and his little sister Kathrin, but Monika doesn’t take the job too serious. She’d rather go for a ride with her boyfriend. Through a unforeseen row of circumstances, Achim becomes the murderer of his sister, and hides the body in a wrecked car on the scrapyard. When the parents return home, a frantic search for the little child begins. Only the father (Sieghardt Rupp) seems to know the truth…Read More »

Synopsis:
A cop from the provinces moves to Paris to join the Anti-Crime Brigade of Montfermeil, discovering an underworld where the tensions between the different groups mark the rhythm.Read More »