Crime

The Brink’s Job tells the real-life story of a group of small-time, working-class robbers in Boston, who came together and pulled off the largest robbery in US history, taking the Brink’s security company for $2.8 million in 1950. Peter Falk plays the ringleader. He tells his wife (Gena Rowlands): “All that money is in there, and it’s being held prisoner, it’s just screaming to me through the walls… Well I’m going in there, and I’m gonna get it out.” The film follows the group’s task (and their environment, and their pursuers) with an eye to the pragmatic, but it’s not so procedural (in the sense of Friedkin’s earlier Sorcerer or French Connection) as to hamper the movie’s broad purpose: reanimating an old news headline, into a fun sort of ensemble heist folktale.Read More »

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Rome Express is a fast-moving British imitation of Hollywood’s Grand Hotel formula. The film concentrates on the various passengers of a European express train. On this particular run, the train is a veritable hotbed of intrigue, with crooks and blackmail victims seemingly in every coach. Among the naughty and nice characters are continental favorites Conrad Veidt, Cedric Hardwicke and Finlay Currie, as well as American silent film star Esther Ralston. Rome Express enabled director Walter Forde to graduate from inexpensive regional comedies to prestige British productions. The film was also an obvious inspiration for such later intrigue-on-the-rails epics as The Lady Vanishes (38) and Night Train (39). Rome Express was remade in 1948 as Sleeping Car to Trieste.Read More »

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Set in the Midlands of Britain in the summer of 1983 and scored to the exhilarating reggae bounce of Toots and the Maytals, This Is England is a classic coming-of-age story.
Shane Meadows’ semiautobiographical film, The 400 Blows, is as timely today in any inner city as it was a quarter of a century ago in Yorkshire, where unemployment and restlessness were high.Read More »

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A Colombian writer returns to his native Medellín to mourn his lost youth and, while he’s at it, pick up a new one. That, more or less, is the tale that Barbet Schroeder’s new movie has to tell. Schroeder has made some spicy pictures in his time, but this one feels lacklustre by comparison, and the two main performers-Anderson Ballesteros as the hustler and German Jaramillo as his aging mentor-tend to drift through their scenes, trying not to notice the hellfire around them. Whether they are genuinely ground down by the woes of the world or simply exhausted by years of casual sex is hard to work out; to be fair, few directors could make a film about moral anesthesia without sinking into glumness, and Schroeder does a pretty good job of insuring that no one in the audience will book a Colombian vacation in the near future.Read More »

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When a madman calling himself “the Scorpio Killer” (Andrew Robinson) menaces the city, tough as nails San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) is assigned to track down and ferret out the crazed psychopath.Read More »

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The story takes place in occupied Korea at the start of the 20th century, where a young student in medicine discovers the murdered body of the son of a government official. Being scared of being accused, he decides to hire Hong Jin-ho (a detective) to help him find the murderer before the police accuse him of the murder.Read More »

Synopsis:
Paul, Joe and Louie go on a bloodthirsty and pointless crime spree, much to the dismay of Paul’s girlfriend (Eleonora Giorgi) and the local police commissioner (Tomas Milian) . The group starts by robbing a gas station where Paul guns down three people. They later rob a bank and a grocery store where Paul kills off an entire other gang that was helping him rob the place. It isn’t long before the entire police force is out to nab the 3 criminals, who pick up the girl and proceed to hightail it to the Swiss border.Read More »

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Film Forum writes:Poor relation Dennis Price, ninth in line to the Dukedom of Chalfont, coolly narrates from prison his ascent to the peerage via serial murder, bumping off one D’Ascoyne after another, from an arrogant playboy, to a bullet-headed general, to a stiff-upperlipped Admiral, to a dotty reverend, to a formidable dowager — all, plus three more, played by Alec Guinness.Read More »

Synopsis:
Espionage agents Valya (Jean Kent) and Zurta (Albert Lieven) break into an embassy in Paris to steal a diary filled with crucial political secrets. The spies pass the diary on to accomplice Karl (Bonar Colleano) — who then double crosses them, fleeing on the Orient Express to sell it abroad. The agents go after Karl to regain the diary, and a police inspector pursues the agents — while on the train, an unfaithful couple, a writer and a bird-watcher become unwitting participants in the drama.Read More »