new york city

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026)

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Modern life is increasingly difficult for Harry Lehman (John Turturro), whose lifelong pickpocketing career doesn’t yield the same profits it used to in the present year of 2026, where everyone’s money is digital and their consumer electronics are easily trackable and difficult to fleece. Estranged from his daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), he spends his days on the streets and in the subways trying to get together enough money to cover medical expenses for his comatose second wife, Rose. When he manages to lift a set of keys off of a young punk named Dylan (Will Price, who plays Tim Robinson’s son on The Chair Company) driving a classic car, he empties out a duffel with some cash and a USB drive, which he recognizes as a computer gadget but doesn’t know anything else about. When his regular fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) plugs it into the pawn shop’s computer, neither of the old men understand that they’ve managed to tip off the drive’s owner to their location or that they’ve got their hands on a crypto wallet worth close to a million dollars. By the time Dylan shows up to Ben’s shop and ransacks it looking for the crypto drive, it’s already been hawked to Ben’s counterpart in Chinatown, forcing Harry to go on a trek to get it back before Dylan, who turns out to be the scion of a mafia family, kills Rose.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an elegy for a lost era and a lost city, which it telegraphs from its opening moments, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It also feels as if it’s drawing inspiration from the 1974 film Harry and Tonto (down to the main character’s name), which was also about a New Yorker experiencing late in life alienation from the city that had been his home for his entire life, and whose situation leads him to a single, meaningful encounter with his estranged daughter. While Art Carney’s Harry goes on an emotionally uplifting journey where we join him in finding a place in a changing world, Pickpocket is a much more bittersweet narrative, as we know from the moment that Ben reveals that Dylan’s family is connected to organized crime that Turturro’s Harry’s days are numbered. Everywhere he goes, Harry Lehman encounters others of his generation who are unable to keep up with the times. His friendly-but-antagonistic relationship with soon-to-retire detective Allen Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) is marked by a mutual respect, but Warren has also been relegated to a basement desk because he “can’t be retrained” for cybercrime; Ben is useless with computers and requires assistance from his granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles) for anything more advanced than checking his emails; the crime boss who is Dylan’s grandmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) expresses the same hesitancy about crypto currency as Harry does for cell phones, and is ultimately right to be concerned. The world of crime that they all know and can contemplate, theft on a scale from petty to grand, no longer exists.

The key difference between Dylan and Harry is that for the former, crime is a business. At one point, Dylan complains that his family doesn’t respect that he’s trying to bring them into the twenty-first century by lamenting that they can’t send him off to an Ivy League school and then get annoyed that he’s committed to “first concepts.” For the latter, crime is a way of life. Harry doesn’t moralize his way of “earning” a living, he just does the only thing that he knows how to do, acting as part of a larger economic ecosystem. Dylan is established early on as a fad chaser, as he orders a drink because he was inspired by an influencer and ends up hating it. As the bartender says, nine thousand likes on the video he saw does not translate to nine thousand people trying the drink. This scene also establishes something important about how the two men approach their business; Dylan is loud, flashy, and trendy, and only gets away with what he does because of his family connections, while Harry’s entire mode of being revolves around being unnoticed, quiet, and unassuming, and his line of work ultimately cost him his family. Neither is a particularly good way to live, but it ends up proving easier for an old dog to learn a couple of new tricks than it is for a young buck to learn not to run his mouth; if Dylan hadn’t been so concerned with showing off his smart watch and all of its features to Harry, then Harry would never have had the small victory that he does in the end. Although this could lead to the film feeling too reactionary in a “it’s the children who are wrong” way, the narrative smartly balances Dylan’s arrogance by including both Ben’s aforementioned granddaughter and a young pickpocket that Harry catches in the middle of a lift and briefly mentors.

Turturro is quite good here, although this is such an undemanding role that an actor of his talent could sleepwalk through it (which Curtis does in her single scene). The film goes out of its way to show you that Harry is very talented at what he does. Lock-picking, palm-greasing, and wallet-lifting come to him as easily as breathing; it’s just that those skills aren’t relevant in a more modern world. As such, the film also feels like a comment on the decline of the power of labor in the modern age. Turturro is fun even if he’s not being challenged as an artist, and he and Buscemi have an easy natural chemistry that ensure the film is worth checking out just to see the two of them spend some time together, if nothing else. If one had to choose between Buscemi’s performances in Wild Horse Nine and Pickpocket, his nomination for best supporting actor should be for this one. I’ll admit to some bias because I adore her, but Maslany is the real standout for me here. She fulfills the same role that Ellen Burstyn did in Harry and Tonto as the daughter that our main character has let down too many times. The dialogue is rote and a little trite—”I go to a real job [for my family],” “My family doesn’t get bologna sandwiches from a food bank while I’m waiting for a bond ticket,” etc.—but Maslany is magnificent and wrings pathos from the tired tropes anyway because she’s just that good.

Carefully riding the line between conservative movies that your dad would like because old salts get the upper hand over young upstarts and a lo-fi heist picture, this is one to check out, although it’s not going to be one that you need to rush out to theaters to see on the big screen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995)

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I have never been more creatively or spiritually fulfilled than I was for the few brief years when my biggest weekly priority was an academically rigorous poetry workshop. Still, I gave up the practice as soon as I graduated college, realizing that sticking with it would mean a life-long professional dedication to academia, something I had no interest in pursuing. I was fondly reminded of those days while watching the documentary A Litany for Survival, though, which features several scenes of its subject—activist-poet Audre Lorde—running a poetry workshop at Hunter College in New York City. She’s tough on her students’ work in a productive, fully engaged way that you can see improving their art in real time. Other formidable poets like Adrienne Rich & Sonia Sanchez appear in interviews to reminisce about how Lorde improved their own work through a similar kind of collaborative criticism, pushing them to sharpen their ideas through revision. It’s difficult to write meaningfully without that kind of peer-to-peer friction, which is largely why I gave up on the medium of poetry entirely to work on this silly movie blog instead. And that’s not even taking into account how increasingly niche & insular the world of poetry has continued to become in recent decades. Anyone who’s still out there making a full life out of that kind of work is superheroic, since this 90s-era documentary already feels like a time machine trip back to the last moment it was considered societally Important in any way.

Audre Lorde was tough on everyone: her students, her colleagues, her children, her nation, herself. Which is to say that she continuously fought for a better world the entire time she was alive, applying her skill for ruthless revision to societal structures the same way she applied it to her own poetry, through political activism causes like Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Feminism. She billed herself as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” rising to prominence in the literary world in the 1960s & 70s, when those identity markers had a real-life chance to either get you killed or change the world. Her writing and her activism were both heavily fixated on Intersectionality, drilling down into the particulars of what made her a distinct social outsider while also seeking commonality among comrades who were fighting similar struggles. By the time documentarians Michelle Parkerson & Ada Gay Griffin told her life story in the 1990s, she had shifted to fighting a very different fight: battling cancer instead of oppression. A Litany for Survival is a very straight-forward, made-for-PBS style production, but it took nearly a decade to complete, so a significant chunk of the footage features Lorde wheezing through her final days while suffering from lung cancer, no longer able to perform her poems with her usual fierceness. Thankfully, they were around for her healthier days too, when she could still provoke & incite with the best of ’em.

In both form & content, the movie Litany most reminded me of was the more recent documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Giovanni occupied such a similar place in American literature that Litany only passingly references her by her first name, “Nikki”, since you presumably already know who she is if you’re watching this profile of her contemporary. Both films exceed their limitations as PBS-style documentary profiles of activist-poets by drifting through different phases of their lives instead of strictly following a linear birth-to-death biography. We meet Lorde in her final years of illness, when she can barely speak. Earlier, more forceful interviews about her life story then mix with audiobook readings of her prose autobiography Zami, live readings of her most iconic poems, and candid domestic scenes shared with loved ones in the final decade of her life. None of these conversations or monologues feel complete in representation; the edit crossfades between them like overlapping waves, illustrating the images evoked by Lorde’s past with still photographs from her personal albums and vintage NYC stock footage. It’s a full life retold in out-of-context snippets, with the only incomplete element being that we never see the world through Lorde’s own handheld camcorder, which she points around her home garden in her final days as a new way to capture images for her art.

A newly restored version of A Litany for Survival recently saw its local premiere at the Patois Film Festival, screening at the Joan Mitchell Center instead of the fest’s usual home at The Broad. That venue choice was . . . suboptimal for appreciating what the new scan might have offered as a pure sensory experience, but it did contribute to my personal nostalgia for college-level poetry workshops. It was projected onto a scuffed-up screen that unrolled from the ceiling; every shifting body in the packed room’s hard-backed chairs could be acutely heard & felt; and the presentation concluded with a panel discussion about how Lorde’s work was an effective form of political activism. It was a perfect simulation of a college classroom environment, like a VR headset experience of what it might be like to have Audre Lorde sit across a workshop table from you, pushing you to do better work and to make a better world. I’m still not convinced that I should quit my desk job and enroll in grad school just because I miss participating in those workshops for real (if not only because the guaranteed outcome would be me getting another desk job after graduating, with only more debt to show for it), but it was a pure pleasure to return to that headspace, and it made for an easy argument that Lorde improved the life & work of everyone she ever collaborated with.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Cinemania (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the NYC repertory cinephilia documentary Cinemania (2002).

00:00 Welcome
01:27 Angel’s Egg (1985)
06:42 The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
14:44 Safety Last! (1923)
21:18 Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)
32:55 “Wuthering Heights” (2026)
48:48 Pillion (2026)
54:48 EPiC – Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
59:06 Funny Pages (2022)
1:13:17 Dolly (2026)
1:17:28 RRR (2022)
1:29:42 Network (1976)
1:32:50 The Power of the Dog (2021)

1:38:45 Cinemania (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Little Fugitive (1953)

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“Love For Movies Causes Boy, 10, To Lose A Week
SAN LEANARDO, Feb. 10 (U.P.)
Ten-year old Richard Allen was back home here today after a ‘lost week”—most of it spent inside San Francisco motion picture theaters.
His father found him emerging from a theater after he had been missing for seven days. During that time Richard set he had spent $20 on 16 movies, 15 comic books, six games, 150 candy bars and a large number of hot dogs.
‘I guess I just like movies,'”

That 1947 United Press newspaper clipping regularly makes the meme rounds online and for good reason: it’s charming as hell. Even without dwelling on the price of movie tickets and candy bars in 1940s San Francisco, there’s something lovably old-fashioned about Richard Allen’s childhood mischief that feels more like the kind of behavior you’d see in the comic strip section of the newspaper instead of amongst the actual news. Just a few years later, on the opposite US coast, independent filmmakers Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin staged their own version of Richard Allen’s “Lost Week” in 1953’s Little Fugitive, a low-stakes crime caper about a 7-year-old boy who spends two days as an unsupervised runaway at Coney Island. Like the newspaper clipping above, Little Fugitive plays like a Sunday-funnies comic strip rendered in live action. It’s like an “Oops! All Sluggos” edition of Nancy, or The Little Rascals acting out a daytime noir. Personally, I’d rather “lose a week” at a San Francisco movie theater than a Brooklyn amusement park, but it’s the same hot-dog flavor of vintage mischief all the same.

7-year-old Joey Norton (played by one-and-done actor Richie Andrusco) is too small to do anything fun. He gets easily flustered watching his big brother Lennie play with other, older Brooklynites because he can’t throw rocks or hit baseballs half as hard as them, and they’re equally frustrated with having to look after a younger kid who’s effectively still a toddler. In an attempt to scare Joey off so they can play big-boy games without him, the kids prank the little tyke into believing he has shot his brother dead with a rifle, using a bottle of ketchup to simulate a bloody wound. Freaked out that he’s soon to be arrested for “moider,” Joey hides out from the law at the funnest place in the world to become anonymous: Coney Island. While Lennie’s worried sick about where his little brother has run off to, Joey deliberately makes himself sick on cotton candy, Coca-Cola, and “a large number of hot dogs.” Once he gets to the park, the movie drops the need for plot and instead just watches him “lose” two days riding rides and playing games, only occasionally having to duck the attention of cops, who have no idea who he is.

Little Fugitive is most often lauded for its on-the-ground, run-and-gun filmmaking style, serving as a direct precursor to French New Wave gamechangers like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Engel’s innovation in that lineage was applying his war-journalist experience to narrative filmmaking, carrying a small, reconfigured movie camera around a real amusement park to document little Joey’s antics without drawing the attention of the hundreds of unpaid extras. The film partly functions as a documentary of what a day spent at Coney Island might’ve looked like in the 1950s, jumping from attraction to attraction with the giddy enthusiasm of a child with no parents around to say no. However, most of Joey’s journey through the park’s carnival attractions is heavily subjective. The camera is held at Joey’s height, returning audiences to a childhood world where everything you experience is eye-level with adults’ butts. Circus clown automatons are shot from low angles, appearing as disconcertingly jolly jump scares. In the brief period when Joey runs out of money and hasn’t yet figured out a scheme to earn his keep collecting glass bottles, he becomes a kind of ghost, totally ignored by everyone else at the park, as if this were more of a meaningful precursor to Carnival of Souls than 400 Blows. It’s documentary, sure, but it’s all distored through a child’s funhouse mirror perspective on the world of adults.

It’s difficult to tell a story through a child’s worldview without becoming overly saccharine, but Engel & Orkin manage just fine. Young Joey’s obsession with horses (inspired by his addiction to cowboy-themed TV shows) starts as a cutesy character detail, but it gets outright pathological by the time he’s collecting armfuls of bottles for another small taste of the 25¢ pony rides. Despite the title, he’s never in any real danger or trouble, and the only threats to his innocence are in having to learn how to make his way in the world. He quickly learns that if he wants to ride the ponies again, he’s going to have to work hard enough to earn the money himself, which in this case entails collecting trash from distracted adults who are making & passing out on the nearby beach. In that way, the film also starts to resemble another much-memed phenomenon from recent years: the Japanese game show Old Enough!, in which young children are tasked to run errands usually handled by their parents, while filmed from a safe distance. Regardless of whether it’s in reality-TV gameshows, vintage newspaper clippings & comic strips, or classic French cinema, it’s fun to watch kids figure out how to navigate the world without adult supervision. The trick is just to keep in mind that they’re people—however small & inexperienced—not adorable, chipper mascots who say the darndest things.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #257: Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) & Pre-Giuliani NYC

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Welcome to Episode #257 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies made on the grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York City, starting with the queer musical comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972).

00:00 Krewe du Goo
03:53 While We’re Young (2014)
10:00 Lost in America (1985)
14:20 Another Woman’s Husband (2000)
21:03 Sudden Fury (1993)
25:23 Broken (1993)

36:00 Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972)
1:02:00 Klute (1971)
1:21:00 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
1:36:00 The Exterminator (1980)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Exiled: A Law & Order Movie (1998)

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As I’ve previously mentioned in recent reviews of The Night of the Juggler, Highest 2 Lowest, and every podcast topic I can shoehorn it into, I’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order lately. I had never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural before this summer, and I’m now roughly 200 episodes deep into its original run, both facts to my shame. Part of the attraction in early seasons of the show is how pristine their current HD scans look on Hulu, especially in the initial stretch where most episodes were shot by all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. Now that I’m halfway into the ninth season, that attention to visual craft has mostly faded, and I’m more addicted to the storytelling format than I am impressed by the imagery. So it goes. However, I have recently found, hidden in those Hulu uploads, a made-for-TV Law & Order movie that aired in November of 1998 and makes a conscious effort to return to the cinematic slickness of the show’s early style. The only problem with Exiled: A Law & Order Movie, really, is that it’s all law and no order, deviating from the show’s bifurcated format to only focus on the police work that leads to a suspect’s arrest, skipping over the courtroom litigation that follows. That choice undercuts the set-up, punchline rhythms that make the show so routinely satisfying, but I suppose movies have a lot more leeway to leave an audience hanging. As someone currently invested in the show’s season-to-season quality shifts, it was an illustrative reminder of how much the show has changed over its first decade on air, dialing the clock back to where it started in 1990. I can’t imagine it’s especially useful to anyone who’s not currently nursing a Law & Order addiction, though, since it just barely works as a by-the-numbers cop thriller without its connection to the show.

Exiled is first & foremost a vanity parade for actor (and credibly alleged sexual abuser) Chris Noth, likely intended to capitalize on his then-recent premiere as Mr. Big on the hit HBO Show Sex and the City. Noth even gets a partial “Story By” credit, indicating that he got to shape how his original-cast Law & Order character, Detective Mike Logan, would return for his two-hour victory lap. For those who haven’t seen or thought about Detective Mike Logan since the 1990s, I will remind you that his character left the show in disgrace after punching a homophobic politician in front of TV news cameras, finally letting his hothead temperament get away from him in front of the wrong people. The “exile” of the title refers to his reassignment after that incident, having been shipped off to work domestic calls on Staten Island instead of homicide cases in Manhattan. At the start of the movie, he recovers a drowned corpse in the bay between his old life and his new one, shrewdly deciding to angle for his old job back by claiming jurisdiction over a homicide that clearly belongs to the other side. From there, Logan immediately returns to his old ways. He whores around Manhattan, shamelessly hitting on both the victim’s twin sister and his new partner, while interrogating suspects in his old favorite strip joints up & down 42nd Street (the kind that only exist on broadcast television, where strippers conspicuously dance in their bras & panties instead of fully nude). Like all “very special episodes” of Law & Order, the investigation inevitably leads to the mafia and a major corruption scandal, except now the TV-movie budget can afford a couple car chases & shootouts that the show never splurges on. Because Logan isn’t slated to return to the main cast of the show (as he quickly becomes busy tormenting Carrie Bradshaw elsewhere in the city), the movie then has to return him to where he starts in this story: an ambitious hothead loser with a barely manageable sex addiction, eternally imprisoned on Staten Island. It digs him back up just to bury him all over again.

Exiled is most interesting as an outlier curio for longtime Law & Order fans, an extended side-quest episode packed with trivial tidbits. It’s the only entry in the Law & Order canon I can name that doesn’t feature the iconic theme song or gavel-bang sound effects. Dana Ekleson’s casting as Logan’s Staten Island partner marks the first female detective in the show’s main cast. Ice-T also makes his first appearance  here, although in this instance he’s playing a pimp named Kingston, not his detective character from Law & Order: SVU. It’s also the last time Mike Logan appears in the main cast of the flagship show, only returning later in recurring cameos on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Speaking of its infinite spin-off series, 1998 was the very last year that Law & Order remained a singular, standalone show and not a franchise brand. To that end, Noth’s return to the series here is a naked effort to tie together all the loose threads of the original show’s casts before they fray beyond repair. Hilariously, that move makes the movie double as both a vanity project for Noth and also a tearful goodbye to John Forie’s background player Detective Tony Profaci, who hangs around the first eight seasons of the show doing nothing in particular except handing reports to the characters who matter. If the name “Profaci” means nothing to you, then there’s nothing to see here, but I found it amusing to see him get the Main Player treatment in Exiled while fan favorites Jerry Orbach & Sam Waterston are relegated to his usual background role. Also, Dabney Coleman fills in the Special Guest Star slot to maintain some continuity in the show’s usual format, even if the courtroom drama half is skipped entirely. Exiled is a snapshot of where the Law & Order of old (1990) intersects with the Law & Order of “now” (1998), captured just before the show mutated into a new, unmanageable beast. Now that this is out of my system, I will do my best not to clutter up this movie blog with too many more dispatches from my series watch-through in the second half of the show’s run, but I can’t make any promises. I’m already in too deep.

-Brandon Ledet

The Age of Innocence (1993)

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The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Times Square (1980)

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For anyone out there arguing that movie studios should start cutting “unnecessary” sex scenes for the sin of not “advancing the plot,” I recommend seeking out populist art from earlier, safer decades, when that kind of conservative moralism was more shameless. Take, for instance, the teen-punks-on-the-run love story Times Square from 1980, which had all of its sex & kissing scenes removed post-production by money men who were scared that its queer themes would cut into the film’s profitability. The surviving prints are proof of sex-scene-censorship in action, leaving behind implications of sapphic teen romance without any physical consummation that might scare off the cinematically illiterate who don’t catch on. Of course, this very nearly ruins the movie. Not knowing exactly when the two girls at the center first acknowledge their mutual attraction is alone frustrating enough, but there’s also so much communication & characterization lost by averting the audience’s eyes from their bedroom intimacy that it feels like a story half-told. This is the future Liberals want: sexless, indistinct, defanged. That contingent even gets their own onscreen avatar in the form of the film’s villain, Peter Coffield as a Liberal politician who’s campaigning to “clean up” the smut of late-70s Times Square, to make it safer for families (and business). Eat up, prudes.

That politician’s daughter is effectively our main character: Trini Alvarado as a sheltered Uptown Girl who’s essentially left catatonic by her father’s blowhard moralizing. She’s checked into a mental hospital for being an inconvenience in her father’s busy schedule as a public figure, despite the fact that there’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her hospital roommate is a street-smart punk rocker played by newcomer Robin Johnson (counterbalancing her porcelain-doll fragility with some manic Linda Manz brashness), who might legitimately be mentally ill. The girls quickly bond over mutual disregard for the authority figures in their lives and make a break for it, fleeing the hospital in a stolen ambulance to their new, domestic life squatting in a warehouse by the river. It’s unclear exactly when their friendship tips over into romance, thanks to post-production censorship, but that aspect of their dynamic is undeniably present throughout. They write each other poems, they scream each other’s names, they wear each other’s clothes; they’re in love. Meanwhile, their new life on the streets is turned into a publicity flame war between the Liberal politician who believes Times Square has become an “X-rated” public space in need of governmental censorship and a shock-jock radio DJ who wants to keep the city grimy for the punk-at-heart, played by an especially pouty Tim Curry.

While I don’t think the kissing or sex scenes removed from Times Square would have been redundant, I did laugh at the redundancy of the concluding title card that announces it was “filmed entirely on location in New York City.” This a film that spends half of its runtime strutting up and down 42nd Street in search of classic New York City cool before Giuliani power-washed it off the sidewalk forever. It’s a treasure trove for movie freaks who like to take notes on what’s being advertised on vintage marquees in the background. Its soundtrack is overflowing with classic New York City bands, including The Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and that one Talking Heads song where they name-drop CBGB. The runaways aren’t solely fighting to carve out a place for themselves at the edge of adult surveillance & censorship; they’re also fighting to make it big as micro-celebrities in the first-wave NYC punk boom. They brand themselves as The Sleez Sisters, smashing televisions on city streets as a vague protest of modern complacency and crashing the alt radio station to speak directly to their adoring public of frustrated, sheltered teen girls. The major political question at the heart of the film is who really owns New York City, the freaks who walk the concrete or the inhuman politicians who govern their public & private lives from afar? It’s a question with a loud, celebratory answer, as observed from the rooftops by Tim Curry & Robin Johnson, who survey the city streets below from gargoyle perches like a punk-rock Batman.

Times Square is the most [SCENE MISSING]iest movie I’ve fallen in love with in a while.  It was crudely chopped to bits by The Man, but its crudeness & messiness is at least appropriate for a story about teenage runaways in love. Director Allan Moyle has, understandably, expressed frustration over the surviving, compromised cut of the film, but he still at least seems proud of its documentation of Times Square’s final days in sleaze, and he effectively plagiarized its rooftop concert ending for his record-store hangout comedy Empire Records years later. The film shares a lot of post-production-fuckery woes with fellow teen-girl-punks-on-the-lam relic The Fabulous Stains, but it likewise has outlived attempts to chop it down and achieved a kind of cult-cinema immortality. To be clear, though, it’s a great film despite its sex-and-smooches censorship, not because of it. Audiences have been robbed of experiencing the film’s full passionate glory by Liberal do-gooders who sought to make a safer, cleaner picture at the expense of honesty & art. It’s the same political principles that scrubbed Times Square clean of all of the grit, smut, and vitality that made it interesting and replaced them with a Disney Mega Store & Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant venture. Congratulations, the streets are no longer X-rated; now it’s just as formless, indistinct, and sanitized as everywhere else in this corporate hell hole of a country.

-Brandon Ledet

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

Kiss of Death (1947)

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Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget.  1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities.  After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark.  This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away.  At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame.  Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs.  It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.

Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium.  Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute.  Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture.  Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker.  When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.”  He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.”  He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way.  He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.

Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing.  Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty.  It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies.  Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template.  Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show.  He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.

-Brandon Ledet