Category: Crime
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The Gentlemen
“There’s fuckery afoot.” The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie, 2019) When Guy Ritchie decides to make a Guy Ritchie movie, it’s always a fun time. Despite the fact that the narrative structure pretty much only exists to be a cute way to cultivate twists and turns, the movie works. Almost everyone is perfectly cast: Hunnam and Farrell…
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The Nice Guys
“I had to question the mermaids.” The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016) Just give Black twenty million bucks and let the man make any Los Angeles-based noir comedy he wants. They are stellar. This movie is an absolute riot; hilarious through and through. While Gosling and Crowe don’t quite obtain the natural chemistry of RDJ…
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The Godfather Part II
“If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything…it is that you can kill anyone.” The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) Coppola’s second of three masterpieces made in the 1970s. Gordon Willis is a god with a camera. Longer, darker, and more complex than the first entry. Also a…
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Drive
“There’s a hundred thousand streets in this city, you don’t need to know the route.” Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) Refn steals all the tropes from the Western genre, distills them, refines them, and renders them so effortlessly as a seedy city crime drama that you forget altogether that they actually are tropes. Ryan Gosling…
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The Godfather
“We’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.” The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) A masterpiece. A perfect movie. Coppola spends the first twenty-seven minutes of the film on a wedding sequence. What a fucking nutjob.
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Only God Forgives
“Time to meet the devil.” Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013) An absolutely bizarre follow-up to the spectacular Drive. A meandering, nightmarish, macabre journey through one of the many seedy underbellies of Bangkok. At times, I couldn’t tell if the protagonist is navigating the world of the film or his own dream palace. Also,…
olde zoetrope 