crime

Bunny (2025)

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2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Murder! (1930)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! entered the public domain this year, which might lead one to think it would be easier for the public to access. I found a copy online and started watching it, only to make it about 20 minutes in before deciding that the degraded audio quality meant that I was never going to be able to make it through the film without subtitles. I then found a subtitle file online and attempted to burn it onto the video using Handbrake, but it was not in sync, and no amount of fiddling would make it work. After I had tried all of that, I found the film on a streaming service heretofore unused by me called Plex, but the subtitles there all appeared to have been auto-generated. Not only were they inaccurate, but the scene in which Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall, who would later appear in Foreign Correspondent) has an interior monologue that plays out in concert (no pun intended) with a radio orchestra broadcast had no captions at all because the auto-caption couldn’t hear the dialogue over the music, making them useless. And so, at last, I turned to our old friend, the people’s streaming service Tubi, where the film was free, the subtitles were mostly accurate, and the Charmin bears were playful indeed.

Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is an actress performing in a travelling troupe in “the provinces” when she is found in an unresponsive state next to the body of another actress; she cannot recall committing any crime but cannot account for her state of mind. She is quickly tried and found guilty, and in a miscarriage of justice that is almost on par with her erroneous conviction, one of the jurors is an acquaintance of hers, the aforementioned Sir John, who is browbeaten into giving a guilty verdict by the other jurors. Sir John feels at fault for what has happened to Diana, as he is a theatrical producer who recommended her for the tour on which the murder happened, and he sets out to try and overturn her conviction by finding the real killer. In this, he is assisted by two of Diana’s fellow actors: a husband-and-wife team named Doucie (Phyllis Konstam) and Ted (Edward Chapman) Markham. 

Murder! was only Hitchcock’s third feature made with sound, and the film itself shows evidence of this in being less dialogue-driven and more image-oriented while also being innovative with regards to this new technology. The aforementioned scene in which Sir John, while shaving and listening to the radio, shames himself in voice over for being so easily influenced by his fellow jurors and recounts his disappointment at being the person who put Diana in the situation where she could be accused in the first place may be the first film depiction of a character having an inner monologue. Soliloquy is nothing new to drama, of course, but film afforded the unique opportunity to have these representations of internality appear as the character’s “thoughts” rather than on-stage asides, and if Hitchcock didn’t create this film language method outright, I have no doubt that he was certainly the first to have the character’s decisive moments align with the crescendoes of the background music. It’s an inspired touch, and one that demonstrates that Hitch really was the master of his craft, even if this film is slow and plodding to the modern eye. At 100 minutes, it’s only slightly longer than The Lodger, which came out three years prior, and a third as long again as the Peter Lorre-starring The Man Who Knew Too Much, which clocked in at seventy-five minutes with a perfect pace. 

If anything, Murder! seems almost experimental, with Hitchcock taking the time to explore all of the ways that he might use sound as part of his films and not worrying too much about whether the runtime could be tightened up a little. The inciting act of violence is relayed via a tracking shot that finds the various performers from Diana and the Markhams’ troupe leaning out of their windows to discern the source of the commotion. The police’s investigation occurs backstage during the next evening’s performances (Diana and the murder victim having been replaced by their understudies, of course), which allows for the sequence to have a lot of life as actors emerge from the dressing room, interact with the detectives, and then get pulled onstage for their scene. Cleverly, this also introduces the fact that two of the characters in the play portray policemen on stage, which plays into a later-revealed clue that Mrs. Markham saw a policeman on the street earlier who was not the same copper who was present at the scene of the crime. If one pays close enough attention, this backstage insight tips us off early on about who the real killer might be. The trial itself plays out very modernly, with montages of witnesses, the judge, and the jury fading into one another before they are adjourned for deliberations, and the jurors discussing the case amongst themselves is good stuff; even though it takes up a solid chunk of screentime, it’s far from the first thing that I’d nominate for the chopping block if we wanted to edit this film down to something more concise. When we find Sir John in his home, we get a series of fade-in/out establishing shots that escort us from his front door to his apartment, which is something that I’m not sure is completely necessary but shows Hitch puzzling out the kind of transitions that will eventually be part and parcel of his unique style as a filmmaker.

The film is not without Hitchcock’s trademark humor, either. Before the Markhams are pressed into assisting Sir John with his investigation, we find them in their boarding house, threatened with eviction by their landlady as their young daughter plays the piano, haltingly and badly, and it’s a fun scene. Sir John also finds himself staying at a boarding house on the road where the landlady’s many children follow her about and climb all over the furniture and luggage, and it’s decently funny. There’s a good energy in the backstage investigation mentioned above that allows for the cast of the play to deliver pithy remarks. Where this remains strongest, though, is in the imaginative use of images and interplay between them; most strikingly, as Diana’s day of execution draws near despite Sir John’s attempts to find the real killer, the montages that show his desperation are double exposed with the shadow of a gallows rising, as the young actress’s fate draws nearer and nearer. This image is then alluded to later when the killer, having returned to their earlier profession as a trapeze artist, realizes that the law has caught up with them and hangs themselves in the middle of their act rather than face trial for their crime. I was also very fond of the shot-reverse-shot scene in which Sir John interviews Diana at the prison, which places them at opposite ends of an almost impossibly long table; they have almost a fisheye lens quality to them that I didn’t expect. 

I also quite like how Murder! is in conversation with stage drama. Above and beyond the obvious elements, it’s a fun idea to have Sir John pretend that he’s planning to produce a new play in order to get all of the actors from the disbanded troupe to interact with him. Even more cleverly, he plans an entire “ripped from the headlines” story in which he’ll be dramatizing the killing, and he catches on the idea of having the man he’s determined is the likely killer play the part of the killer in an audition in hopes of eliciting an accidental confession. He even references the fact that he was inspired in part by Hamlet, which features a play within itself in order to “catch the conscience of the king.” The actors themselves provide a lot of color just by the nature of their profession and their eccentricities. The film’s final moments, in which Diana is freed and is ushered into a room to be embraced by Sir John, are revealed via zoom out to reveal the proscenium arch to all be a stage production as well. It’s playing with a lot for a piece of art in a form that was still so novel and fresh. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shakedown (1988)

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Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

No Other Choice (2025)

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“No other choice,” the new, American corporate overlords of Solar Paper say to Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when he attempts to confront them about their mass lay-offs at the company where he has worked for decades. “No other choice,” Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) says to his wife when she asks why he can’t get a job in another industry; “Paper has fed me for 25 years, honey. It’s how I’m meant to be.” “No other choice,” say Man Su’s interviewers at Moon Paper as they describe their company’s movement to more automation and the removal of all human labor from their process. “No other choice,” Man Su murmurs to himself over and over again, taking the mantra-repeating practice taught in his lay-off exit group counseling session and applying it not to positive affirmations but to reassurances that his increasingly violent actions are justifiable. It’s the refrain of the past as it overshadows the present, a soundbite of self-flagellation about the impossibility of changing the future while actively creating that future in the same moment. 

If you’ve seen the trailers for No Other Choice, then you probably think you know what the film will be about, and to an extent, you’re going to get some of what you’re expecting. That’s the Park Chan-Wook special! I’ve still never seen Oldboy, the film he’s probably best known for, but I have seen (and loved) The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance, Decision to Leave, and Stoker, and No Other Choice can now be added to that list of Park’s great achievements. If you’ve seen any of those films, you’ll also likely remember that they all feature a major upheaval right around the middle of the runtime to the expectations regarding all the ways that the plot could branch and pivot, based on what you’ve become accustomed to from other films in the same genre. No Other Choice presents itself as a film about a man who loses his job and, desperate to cling to the status and lifestyle that his former position offered, turns to murderous ends to eliminate his competitors for a position with a paper company that has “cracked the Japanese market.” That’s true, but in classic Park style, the director manages to take unexpected but plausible turns, with that mid-film sharp turn taking things in entirely unexpected directions. 

In narratives of this type, the protagonist’s family is often left on the margins of the story, treated as merely branches upon which some extensions of the male lead’s drama can hang. Most often, the wife leaves, taking the kids with her, if there are any. Sometimes, she leaves with blackmail material so that her husband must keep his distance. Other films that have a superficially happy ending, as this one does, see the family shunted to the side until the final moments reunite them before the credits roll. Man Su, his wife, stepson, and daughter are all once again ensconced in their home again at the end of the film, but the victory feels temporary. For one, Man Su’s wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) doesn’t know the width and breadth of her husband’s activities, but she knows enough to know that he’s killed, and she not only keeps this secret, but also lies to her son about her husband’s nocturnal adventures to cover for him, so as to prevent him from fearing Man Su. For the rest of her life (or at least the rest of her marriage), she will be forced to maintain a facade of normalcy while compartmentalizing her deception of her son and of her husband, from whom she keeps the knowledge that she had seen one of the bodies he buried. Miri and Man Su have also kept the fact that their boy is not his son, acknowledging between themselves that they promised to tell him once he was old enough to shave, but they decide to maintain that lie as well. For Man Su, it’s also clear to the audience that although he may have wormed his way back into the world of paper manufacturing, this position is even less solid than the one he had before, and it’s likely only a matter of time before he’s laid off again, and then this whole violent cycle may begin anew. 

If I had to treat this review like a middle school book report and identify its theme, I would highlight that this film is about the fickle nature of independence. Man Su and Miri’s daughter is a nonverbal cello prodigy who refuses to play for the family, and even when the characters forego a lot of their costlier possessions—selling both of the family’s luxury cars and consolidating to a singular utilitarian sedan, giving their beloved dogs to Miri’s parents to care for, cancelling their tennis lessons and Netflix subscriptions, and even slowly selling off their furniture and electronics—the one thing that they ensure continues to be paid for are her cello lessons. When she reaches a point when her tutor is no longer able to teach her anything and refers the family to a music professor, the parents replay a conversation that they had earlier in which they talked about how the most important thing that they could do for their daughter would be to ensure that she is able to be independent, which they only see being possible if she becomes a musician. Their son also attempts to attain his own minor financial independence, in a poorly thought out cell phone reselling scheme that almost ends in tragedy, but offers Man Su the opportunity to show off his new, tough attitude in front of Miri when facing off against the owner of the shop, whose son is their son’s best friend and co-conspirator. 

Independence is good for one but not the other, and it’s unclear where Miri lies in all of this. Strangely, almost all of the wives of the four men in competition with one another are unemployed women of leisure; Miri’s life consists of ferrying her children about between their academic and extracurricular activities between tennis bouts, Beom-mo’s wife is an actress who can’t seem to get a part and has so much free time she still manages to carry on an affair in a house with a laid-off husband, second victim Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won)’s wife is unmentioned, and his final victim Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) is recently divorced and seems to still be supporting his ex. All of them are literally dependent, and what independence they do achieve undermines their respective husbands’ masculinity, through adultery, the perception of infidelity, or something completely different. Man Su’s suspicions about his wife are unfounded, with his overall hypocrisy highlighted by the fact that what he’s done is much, much worse than being unfaithful. Every man here tells himself that he has no other choice, and they’re all wrong, to their respective downfalls. 

This is a beautifully shot film, with fantastic and imaginative use of color. That’s never been something that Park has been afraid of, but it makes this combination of his uniquely unforgiving style and a (new to me) almost slapstick sense of comedy synthesize into something unique, and the almost Technicolor landscape makes it all the more special. The film is also full of seeming mundanities that might be metaphors for us to puzzle out over multiple viewings. A great deal is made out of Man Su’s tooth pain, as he has a molar that’s rotting away but he can’t do anything about it, until he finally pries the thing out in a primal rage in the film’s final half hour. There’s also time spent on the backstory of the house, that it was the house he grew up in and it stood on the edge of his father’s pig farm, but the farm went bust when a couple hundred pigs had to be put down due to a disease and were buried in a mass grave that still exists under part of the property. It’s grim stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading other critics’ analyses and interpretations in the coming months just as much as I’m looking forward to a rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Purple Noon (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Alain Delon’s star-making crime thriller Purple Noon (1960), adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

00:00 Welcome
06:30 Day of the Dead (1985)
14:24 The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
21:58 Leila and the Wolves (1984)
27:35 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 – Dream Warriors (1987)
35:39 The Long Walk (2025)
48:20 Twinless (2025)
55:52 Lurker (2025)

1:04:41 Purple Noon (1960)

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– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

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What could be more thrillingly romantic than young, destitute artists falling in love while starving and drinking themselves to death on the streets of Paris? Try those young lovers beating up cops and lifting businessmen’s wallets together against a backdrop of fireworks & gunfire. Leos Carax’s 1991 stunner The Lovers on the Bridge depicts the kind of ferocious, burn-it-all-down love affair that scares everyone outside the mutually destructive pair at the center, whose romantic gestures include acts of betrayal, theft, murder, and institutionalization. It approaches Parisian homelessness with the same unsentimental, semi-documentary eye as Varda’s Vagabond, and yet it largely plays as a love letter to impulsive, erratic behavior instead of a dire warning against it. It’s a love story rotting in illness, addiction, and retributive violence, which greatly helps undercut the schmaltz when it frames the Eiffel Tower through the rotating spokes of a Ferris wheel. Countless movies gesture towards the all-consuming, obsessive passion of young love without ever fully capturing it; The Lovers on the Bridge is the real deal.

The English translation of the original French title is a deliberate simplification. The French title Les Amants du Pont-Neuf makes reference to a specific bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris (despite the name “Pont Neuf” paradoxically translating to “New Bridge”). It’s a historic site that has been cited as the location where the first human figure was ever captured in a photograph, an early daguerreotype experiment by the eponymous Louis Daguerre. It was also temporarily closed to the public for restoration from 1989 to 1991, when the film was set & produced. Juliette Binoche & Denis Lavant play young homeless artists who squat on that closed historic bridge, unsure how much they can trust one another despite their obvious mutual obsession. Our two lovers first encounter each other while their partner is unconscious. Binoche finds Lavant’s unresponsive, blackout drunk body in the street and sketches his corpse-like visage from memory. Once recovered, Lavant later finds Binoche sleeping in his personal alcove on the bridge, discovering the charcoal sketches of his own undead face and studying her with the same intense fascination in return. Once both awake, they start guzzling gallons of trash wine together and committing escalating crimes in the streets on either side of the Pont Neuf, coinciding with the citywide bicentennial celebration of The French Revolution. A painter and a street-performing firebreather, respectively, the homeless couple become unlikely, reckless avatars for the city’s long history of art, sex, violence, and sensual romance, breathing new life into Parisian clichés that have otherwise become as stale as an old baguette.

Like all great romances, The Lovers on the Bridge is propelled by tragedy. The film opens with Lavant’s unresponsive body being scraped off the pavement where he’s been run over in traffic. He’s washed & patched up by a city-run homeless shelter and then re-released back on the streets, where he immediately falls back into the self-destructive cycle that got him banged up in the first place — guzzling alcohol as intentional self-harm. Meanwhile, Binoche’s struggling artist is suffering a more medically diagnosable malady. Her eyesight is failing her due to a rare form of ocular degeneration that will soon leave her blind and unable to continue working. She’s relatively new to street life, while her drunkard firebreather lover appears to know how to thieve, grift, and glean with the best of ’em. After a short crime spree ties up some loose ends in Binoche’s former life as a semi-wealthy suburbanite, the pair quickly bond by getting wasted on cooking wine and laughing maniacally. Part of what makes their volatile dynamic so romantic is that either or both lovers could die at any moment, and they’re both selfish enough to die by the other’s hand in a desperate crime of passion. It almost plays a prank on the audience that the movie eventually ends on a moment of quiet sweetness, with Carax restaging the bus ride epilogue from The Graduate as an epiphanic embrace of the central romance instead of a reality-check rejection of it.

Contemporary movie nerds familiar with Leos Carax from the more recent, extravagant productions Holy Motors & Annette would know to expect an ecstatic, expressionistic visual style here that breaks away from the movie’s semi-documentary opening. Once Binoche & Lavant lock onto each other’s romantically nihilistic wavelength, the visual language soars — sometimes literally, mixing images of swarming birds and helicopters in a single, seemingly impossible shot. Their lives are small, tethered to a single stone bridge, but nothing about their depiction is simple. The painter cannot simply take her daily birth control pill; her lover must feed it to her via open-mouthed kiss. It’s not enough for the doomed pair to peer into the social lives of more fortunate & fashionable Parisians from the streets outside; the windows into nightclub are lowered to the pavement, so all that’s visible is the wealthy’s dancing feet & flashing lights. When laughing like children while high on bargain-bin wine, Carax uses a shift-tilt lens and oversized set decoration to physically shrink his performers in the frame. This expressionistic visual approach reaches its fever pitch during a grand bicentennial fireworks display, which is used as a backdrop for a Sinners-style musical sequence that mixes orchestral chamber music, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Bal-musette accordion waltzes into one delirious post-modern cacophony. Improbably, it lands as one of the most romantic sequences of cinematic spectacle I can recall instead going full cornball. It’s also immediately followed by the lovers bonking a beat cop on the head and hijacking his boat for a joy ride, somehow escalating the visual spectacle even further through a brief detour into vaudevillian slapstick.

The Lovers on the Bridge was recently restored in a new 4k scan by Janus Films, and it’s currently bouncing around American arthouses. I recently caught it at The Broad’s weekly Gap Tooth Cinema rep series in New Orleans, weeks after Boomer reported it was playing alongside Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang at the Austin Film Society one state over. That loose thematic trilogy surprisingly makes up half of Carax’s total catalog of features, which means he’s not an especially intimidating auteur to catch up with in terms of prolificacy. There’s more out there than just Holy Motors, but not much more. The Lovers on the Bridge is as good of a place to start as any, since it’s so utterly romantic, so utterly violent, and so utterly, utterly French.

-Brandon Ledet

2 Highest 2 Lowest

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Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).

I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.

Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.

I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.

Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).

-Brandon Ledet

Young and Innocent (1937)

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After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Train here. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall. 

The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence. 

De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away. 

The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold. 

Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Buffalo ’66 (1998)

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There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet