Category: Crime drama

Night Moves (1975)

A private detective out of his depth in this excellent 70s conspiracy-thriller tinged noir detective drama

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Edward Binns (Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Janet Ward (Arlene), James Woods (Quentin), John Crawford (Tom Iverson)

“Yeah, but he didn’t see it. He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have.” That’s how Harry Moseby – PI, retired footballer and chess enthusiast – explains the fall out of a 1925 chess championship game, where the losing player failed to spot a checkmate in three through a brilliant flurry of knight moves. There’s a reason why a tweaked version of this makes the title (Penn argued it was because so many key scenes were set at night, though I suspect he just worried the alternative would either be too confusing or tip the wink too much). Turns out the case Moseby is investigating is just like that chess game, with himself as the losing player failing to spot the killer checkmate move.

That’s the set-up for a very seventies private detective movie, where the hero is effectively living out a fantasy of being Marlowe or Spade, turning down every opportunity to bring himself into the modern world (via a near-fangled database-using detective agency, awash with cash) and pays a heavy price. Because, rather like Matthau in Charley Varrick, Moseby sees himself as last of the Independents, but without (it turns out) the nous or ruthlessness to succeed. Instead, Harry misses everything that turns out to be important, heads down blind alleys, focuses on the wrong motives and ends the film like he spent it, drifting in circles drenched in defeat.

Harry (Gene Hackman) is hired by an ageing former Hollywood starlet (Janet Ward) to find her daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith), a case he solves with relative ease since she is staying with her estranged father-in-law Tom Iverson (John Crawford) and Tom’s wise-crackingly flirtatious marinist girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren). Easy peasy right? Wrong, as Harry finds himself embroiled in a further mysteries and deaths, revolving around links between the family and the world of Hollywood stunt drivers, led by the good-natured Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns). As he scratches the surface of the mystery, he will discover to his horror he is way out of his depth.

Arthur Penn’s detective drama soaks in the paranoic style he virtually made his own, mixed with grimy depression at the world gone to hell. “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Paula asks Harry who responds with a weary sigh of “which one?” Everything feels sordid and shabby: Harry’s job is essentially trailing unfaithful wives; Hollywood is a cheap exploitation flick machine and alcoholic ex-starlet Janet bemoans how good her breasts used to be. It’s a film shot with a grainy, dirty detail by Bruce Surtees and edited with a deliberately disjointed suddenness by Dede Allen, scenes often feeling like they end abruptly or jarringly, leaving us as off balance as Harry is. There is, throughout, a creeping air of confusion and uncertainty – Penn designed the film to require multiple viewings and even then questions remain – not least since vital clues and hints are dropped in with marked casualness, while major red herrings are flashed in front of us.

In the middle of this, Harry wants to be a resourceful, determined, ingenious private eye plucked from Chandler. But he’s far from that, not quite smart enough to realise he’s not that smart. His naïve cluelessness should be clear, since he stumbles only by chance on an affair his wife (Susan Clark) has been having for some time. He lets his prejudices and opinions get in the way of conclusions – most especially in the instant dislike he takes (who can blame him) of James Woods’ snivelling bitter mechanic, a casual boyfriend of Delly, who looks more beat up and scarred every time we see him (a nice hint he’s not the criminal-in-waiting Harry assumes he is). On the other hand, since he likes Edward Binn’s jovial stunt driver Joey, he seems to forget in their first meeting he watched Joey violently rough up a young man in a bar for trivial reasons.

He’s superbly played by Gene Hackman, who makes Harry full of vulnerability and shyness that marks him out as a slightly naïve lost soul, despite his more hard-bitten outer shell. Hackman understands perfectly that Harry is really a big kid, living out a fantasy, but without the instincts or the skill to pull it off. He’s flustered by women (Delly’s casual teenage sexuality, in particular, disorientates him no end) and his all-too-obvious crush on Jennifer Warren’s very well-played mix of femme fatale and wisecracking sidekick is rather sweet. Hackman also invests Harry with an old-world decency and (knightly!) sense of chivalry: he’s disgusted at Tom’s sleeping with his step-daughter (“There should be a law against it” Tom sighs; “There is” Harry contemptuously states) and quickly feels a protective feeling towards Delly.

But despite this, he’s as much a clueless patsy in all this as he is in his marriage, unable to see the wood for the trees. Just like Chinatown, he ends up out of his depth – the difference being the case turns out to be far more mundane then he suspects. In fact, Harry turns out to be the main destructive force of the film: his ham-fisted persistence in delving deeper, panicking characters into murderous actions, even while Harry fails to understand for a moment what he is involved in and who he should be wary of.

It’s a great visual metaphor that Harry only realises (possibly) what’s been going on in the whole film, when he stares down through the sea-view window of Paula’s boat at a vital clue he’s missed all this time. Harry has to strain to interpret what he can see, water and bad lighting obscuring his view. It’s the murky, obscured world of the film bought to visual life. A film during which Harry has closed his ears and eyes to all the crucial details, failed to appreciate the real meanings of the things he has focused on and left himself alone and adrift in a sea of carnage, only just beginning to piece things together (but far too late).

It makes for a superb, labyrinthine detective drama, laced with paranoia and unsettling mystery, with a superb Hackman full of a mix of bashful charm, world-weary cynicism and tragic naivety, clinging to a fantasy that can’t survive contact with reality. Penn’s film might rival Chinatown as the definitive hard-bitten detective drama of the 70s, one where the hero’s every action leads to disaster, every decision is misguided in some way, every conclusion flawed and learns only too late how wrong he was. If that’s not hard-bitten 70s cynicism I don’t know what is.

Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Melville delivers one of his patented, stripped-back, gangster films full of monochromatic Bogart-like cool

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Alain Delon (Corey), André Bourvil (Inspector Mattei), Gian Maria Volonté (Vogel), Yves Montand (Jansen), Paul Crauchet (The receiver), Paul Amiot (Chief of Police), Pierre Collet (Prison guard), André Ekyan (Rico), Jean-Pierre Posier (Mattei’s assistant), François Périer (Santi)

Can you have honour among thieves? Perhaps only when all of you sink or swim together. Three men need a big score and will stick together to get it. Corey (Alain Delon) has the tip-off about a high-end jewellery store, ripe for turning over. He needs the money, as he’s earned the enmity of gang boss Rico (André Ekyan), who repaid Corey’s years of jail-time silence by shacking up with Corey’s girl. Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) is on-the-run after a daring train escape from dedicated Inspector Mattei (André Bourvil). And retired police sharp-shooter Jansen (Yves Montand) just needs a reason to stop hitting the bottle. All of them will come together for a heist.

It’s a classic journey for Melville, another exploration of the director’s love for stripped-back cool with a bunch of broodingly silent 40s throwback crooks in Bogartian-rain-jackets puffing cigarettes and going about their dirty-but-strangely-honourable business in a monochromatic world of nightclubs and hideouts. So far, in fact, so Le Samouraï, Melville’s previous Delon starrer, with Le Cercle Rouge echoing that film’s mix of stripped-back Bresson simplicity with French New Wave existentialism. Like that film, this also starts with an import-filled opening quote (claiming to be from the Buddha) which in fact, Melville actually made-up.

Le Cercle Rouge was a film Melville had planned to make years earlier – only for Rififi to come along and execute (flawlessly) his central conceit of a heist conducted in deadly-cool silence. (“They’re not much for talking” Mattei drily observes here when watching the surveillance footage.) But enough time had gone by for the idea to feel fresh again and the heist is another masterfully forensic piece of Melville-magic, that soaks itself in the detail of carefully executed timing, pin-point marksmanship, just a touch of ruthless violence and unflappable cool. (He even speeds us over the duller parts of the prep with skilfully executed wipes). Montand even gets a kick-ass moment of marksmanship that nearly raises a cheer.

The thieves go about much of their work with ice-cold professionalism. We’ve already had Corey’s anti-authoritarian cool well-established, as he effortlessly disarms and steals a bundle of cash from the furious (and humiliated) Rico before casually besting in a pool-hall punch-up two of Rico’s heavies (Corey doesn’t hesitate to take down the first man in seconds with a pool cue). He’s similarly unphased by taking his new car through a police road-block – neither is he anything more than wryly amused when he spots (naturally, while supping an expresso and cigarette) Vogel climbing into the boot of said car to avoid the cops. Its Delon to a tee, here playing to the hilt the casual, confident cool of a guy who knows he’s pretty much tougher than anyone else in the room.

He’s meets a match of sort in Vogel – in what Melville develops into his idea of bromance, where the bros are two hoods who bound over popping a couple of hitmen. Vogel’s escape from the police has a wildness to it that’s almost missing in the rest of the film until its end, a desperate dive through a window and a helter-skelter run through the forest dodging bullets. There is more twitch in Gian Maria Volonté, but when he decides to trust Corey – and Melville captures this moment with a striking fourth-wall-breaking stare in turn from both actors straight down the camera – he’s all in. So much so, Corey is confident that when Rico’s thugs catch up with him moments later, Vogel will be on hand to dispatch the pair of them, and the two remain inseparable (Corey even loaning Vogel his spare pyjamas) throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s these bonds of loyalty that are an underlying theme to Le Cercle Rouge. In a crime world full of bounders who constantly betray those around them – from Rico’s betrayal of Corey to François Périer’s excellently grimy boss Santi only slightly reluctantly turning informer to make his life easier – these men stand out. The cops seem little better: Melville’s policemen are frequently heavy-handed (Mattei frustratedly has to slap down one cop for pushing Santi’s kid almost to breaking point in a manufactured case set up as a light bit of quid-pro-quo with the gangster), have little loyalty for each other and reach for their guns at every opportunity. Corey’s prison guard is on the take and ex-sharp-shooter Jansen left the force because the corruption was sinking into his soul.

Probably why Jansen is now a drunk, Melville introducing him with a strikingly surreal Buñuel-inspired nightmare, where the sweating Montand imagines jerky, giant spiders, then rats and snakes crawling over him in his gin-soaked bedsit. Nevertheless, Montand has his own code of honour: the job is not about the money, but the chance to chuck the demon drink. And he’s got as much contempt for the police’s corruption as anyone, despite that proudly framed police pistol on his wall. Montand’s nervy attempts to hide his booze dependency are well-done, and Melville executes some fine tension by not showing us the results of Jansen’s pre-heist shooting practice, showing us only Montand’s ambiguous face as he inspects the target.

Arrayed against them, André Bourvil brings a Maigret-like quality to Inspector Mattei – the guy who goes home to his classically-named cats, who he dotes on like a loving dad – but when action comes, he’s just as ruthless as anyone, for all his softly spoken professionalism. He’ll lie, cheat and steal to get evidence or witness co-operation and is as quick to pull his gun (and as deadly with it) as the most hardened criminal. In this cruel, winner-takes-all game of cops-and-robbers (and it’s hard not to spot Michael Mann’s Heat owes a huge debt to Le Cercle Rouge, right down to matching his cooly monochrome visuals) he’s as determined to win as anyone.

Le Cercle Rouge has an odd ending, all characters converging almost with a sense of magical realism in one place, at one time. Of course, this echoes the words of Melville’s opening words of men coming together, on a said day, in the red circle – but then you remember that this quote is just some bollocks Melville made up and it was probably written to add a little bit of philosophical justification to what would otherwise be a very sudden and shallowly plotted, fortuitously unlikely, arrival of every character in a key location at the same time. With the expected deadly results.

Le Cercle Rouge though is taut, chilled and cool Melville at his best, with a dark air of danger throughout and a host of characters playing metaphorical chess while puffing cigarettes and looking unflustered. And, when it comes to that sort of thing, few did it better than Melville.

The Secret Agent (2025)

Dark political drama, with a surreally multi-layered construction, challenging but rewarding

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Cast: Wagner Moura (Armando Solimões), Carlos Francisco (Senior Alexandre), Tânia Maria (Dona Sebastiana), Robério Diógenes (Euclides), Gabriel Leone (Bobbi Borba), Roney Villela (Augusto Borba), Kaiony Venâncio (Vilmar), Maria Fernanda Cândido (Elza), Thomás Aquino (Valdemar), Udo Kier (Hans)

For decades, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship which controlled the country with a brutal, often hidden, hand, spinning a web of tall stories and mythologising to hide its ruthlessness and corruption. This forms the backdrop of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s dark shaggy-dog story of the ‘mischief’ (as the film puts it) of this terrible time, where truth was a hostage of fortune and violence and death could be dealt out at any time by corrupt forces and their accomplices in law enforcement.

In 1977, Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) arrives in Recife during carnival season under the name of Marcelo. It slowly becomes clear he is a former university professor of engineering, on the run from a contract on his life taken out by the corrupt businessman appointed to run his department. In Recife, Armando hides out at a refuge run by former anarcho-communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) and reconnects with his son Marcelo who is being raised by Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), father of Armando’s murdered wife Fátima (Alica Carvalho). A sympathetic contact lands him a role in the police records office, giving Armando opportunity to search for the file of his mother, a woman ‘disappeared’ and murdered by the junta. Meanwhile, two hitmen Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and Augusto (Roney Villela), hunt him down.

Mendonça’s film is put together with the moody leanness of a 1970s conspiracy thriller, mixed with the portmanteau scope of Altman. In its muted colours it has a grim sense that unseen forces watching around every corner. At the same time, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, presenting events in Brazil from a range of perspectives, from the casually corrupt police, to campaigners for justice, to the smorgasbord of refugees in Dona Sebastiana’s commune, including Ghanian immigrants and a persecuted female dentist. These events move smoothly, sometimes with surreal touches and moments of black comedy, with Mendonça not letting us forget that in a country as ill-organised and idiosyncratic as this one, bizarre events and brutal killings are everyday events.

An idea of the sort of country Brazil is, is established from the start, with the film’s atmospheric, tense and darkly funny opening, set in a country-side gas-station. On the forecourt, under a piece of cardboard, lies a slowly rotting corpse of an attempted shoplifter, shot several days ago. When Armando stops for petrol, he’s told the authorities have been informed but have dragged their heels about collecting the body. At which point the police arrive… but have no interest in the body (from which, wild dogs need to be constantly chased away from) instead intimidating Armando, attempting to extract a bribe (he hands over his cigarettes) before disappearing over the horizon. As Armando drives away, the dogs return.

That’s Brazil, it seems, in a nutshell. As well as being expertly filmed, acted and staged, that opening captures the entire mood of black, hopeless, humour in a perfect fusion of Altman and Leone. The more we see of the authorities, the more it confirms our impression of them as greedy, useless bullies interested only in puffing their own position and slapping down anyone who looks like a lefty troublemaker.

The leading cops at the station Armando works at are lazy, racist egotists who idolise a German tailor, played in a fine cameo by Udo Kier, they think is a Nazi war veteran (oblivious to the fact he is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who despises them) and don’t think twice about tossing the bodies of internees into the sea. A severed leg, discovered in the belly of a shark by a marine biologist, is just such a victim – and the cursory (and, for them, unnecessary) attempts to identify this leg’s owner (and to dispose of it a second time) forms another darkly comic thread to the film.

This leg becomes, itself, the centre of the sort of absurdist fantasia that the authorities use to hide their own brutality. In Mendonça’s Carpenter-esque scene of bizarro body horror, we watch a staging of the media’s own report that a series of brutal beatings of gay men in a public park was carried out by this leg (as opposed to, obviously, the police). The police are, of course, fully clued up about the real cause of any violence, just as they have no problem palling around with the cashiered military officers who are now working as private hitman – and are happy to give them tips to their target.

In all this dark corruption, any splash of hope is welcome. Much of this comes from Wagner Moura’s toweringly committed performance as Armando, full of world-weary frustration and bubbling resentment at injustice and a desperate commitment to try and pluck escape from this life of fear. Moura’s Armando is a man of quiet reserve, decency and goodness who has had to become hardened to the circumstances he is in – who finds himself full of rage in a way he never dreamed possible. He carries burdens of grief and guilt at the loss of his wife (unaffected by his father-in-law’s correct suspicions that he was not always faithful) and his attempt to gain details about his mother from the labyrinthine police records he works among gives him some sort of hope of inner peace.

Testimony and the struggle for truth becomes a key theme in The Secret Agent which suddenly surprises us to a flash-forward framing device that shows a modern-day research volunteer transcribing recorded audio conversations between Armando and his resistance group contacts. The truth remains as elusive today as it does in Armando’s time: events unclear to the researchers are clearer to us (as we can see them not just hear them), but many mysteries and questions remain hazy today, with memories and half-truths often the only answers we have.

This is reflected as well in the film’s structure, which drip feeds information slowly. It’s nearly two thirds into the film, until Armando’s full background is made clear, and several events early in the film are only explained into any form of coherent sense by the context provided much later. This can make The Secret Agent a challenging watch: it’s a film that can slip through your fingers as easily as an eel. But it’s reflective of a country where reality itself is hard to grasp: where people can disappear without trace, life can end out of nowhere from an officially sanctioned bullet on the street, your entire life story can be altered by the press and tall tales reported as gospel.

Through it all, The Secret Agent is perhaps striking because (despite its title) it has no espionage in it at all. Only the desperate wading through a swamp of secrets and lies with no clear answers, where truth and humanity can be easily lost. The fact it manages to do this while not losing a dark wit – and powered by Moura’s deeply humane performance – is a testament to Mendonça’s graceful direction, which in its simplicity makes a lasting impression of a world where truth and reality are as much in flux as peace and justice.

The Big House (1930)

Foundational Hollywood prison film, not only establishes many genre tropes but does it with genuine style

Director: George W Hill

Cast: Chester Morris (Morgan), Wallace Beery (Butch), Lewis Stone (Warden), Robert Montgomery (Kent), Leila Hyams (Anne), George F Marion (Pop), JC Nugent (Marlowe), Karl Dane (Olsen), DeWitt Jennings (Wallace), Matthew Betz (Gopher)

We’re all familiar with the prison movie: cell yards, newly arrived prisoners, old lags, gangs, exercise yards, tough wardens, snitches, shivs, escape plans, betting on insect races, coolers, bad food, riots… many of these now age old cliches first sprang into life in The Big House, the first major prison movie released in Hollywood. And it’s a good one, a well-paced mix of character study and morality tale with a surprisingly action packed ending.

In an overcrowded prison, where conditions are as tough as the inmates, new arrival Kent (Robert Montgomery) is nervous. He’s a rich guy struggling to adjust to spending the next seven years in the slammer after he drove the car in a fatal hit-and-run. He’s chucked into a cell with two tough inmates: Morgan (Chester Morris), a strong-and-silent type who takes no nonsense, and Butch (Wallace Beery), his best friend who swings between friendly and threatening. As mutterings about escape plans and prison feuds heat up, Kent goes to increasingly selfish attempts to save his skin, against the advice of Morgan, who is dreaming of his imminent parole.

“Prison doesn’t give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one it brings it out.” Those are the wise words of Lewis Stone’s gruff, patrician warden. It’s fair to say Kent doesn’t listen. One of the neatest tricks The Big House pulls off is the decoy protagonist. As we watch Kent’s intimidating arrival and processing, the ferrying him from room-to-room as he is reduced to another overall-clad number (48642), our natural instinct is to feel sorry for him as Robert Montgomery’s eyes widen in shock and horror. But Kent isn’t our hero. In fact, if anything, he’s the villain.

The more we see of Kent, the more we realise he’s a spoilt rich kid who, uniquely among the main prisoners, takes no responsibility for his crime (even the sociopathic Butch does that). He will betray anyone or anything to try and lesson his sentence: and as a seasoned old-timer tells him, the best material for that is snitching on other prisoners. It’s not long before Kent is nervously planting a shiv in Morgan’s bed (leading to the cancellation of Morgan’s parole), and his utter lack of any sense of principle beyond protecting himself is directly responsible for the concluding prison riot blood bath.

Instead, The Big House’s real hero is Morgan. Played with stoic firmness by Chester Morris, Morgan may well be a criminal (tellingly, of the three principles, he’s a professional thief giving him the most ‘sympathetic’ crime, with no body count) but he has a code of loyalty to his fellows. That doesn’t mean he won’t step in against bullying – he orders Butch to return the cigarettes he wrestles from Kent – but it does mean he’ll turn a dutiful blind eye to their misdemeanours. He sticks firmly to the code of the prison – don’t snitch – even while he planning to go straight. In The Big House, it’s fascinating that is the stool pigeon and snitch who is morally the lowest-of-the-low.

That’s arguably even lower than Butch, even though he’s a sociopathic murderer who wistfully talks about his crimes with slight regret only because they got him caught. But, despite this – and even though, when the riot comes, Butch proves himself absolutely, ruthlessly, without morals – Butch is strangely likeable. Perhaps because Wallace Beery (Oscar-nominated) plays him with a mix of childish innocence as well as brutish bullying. Butch, with his illiteracy and delight in games like racing insects, along with his affectionate readiness to trust (and his blinding rage when he feels betrayed) is like a big kid. He bounds around the yard like the king of the playground.

The heart of The Big House is the close friendship (and, while surely unintentional, it’s hard not to see a homoerotic undercurrent) between Butch and Morgan. These two are inseparable, trust each other completely, tell each other everything and won’t hear a word against each other from someone else. They are both familiar with the slammer, a dark corridor with several tiny, dark cells. Butch gets chucked in there after leading a dinner hall protest at the terrible food – the protest that will lead to him passing his shiv to Kent who then plants it on Morgan to gain favour with the guards. This leads to Morgan’s spell there – where, in a fixed shot of the empty corridor, Hill has us overhear the shouted conversation between the two as Morgan vows revenge and Butch naively argues he can’t believe Kent would do that.

Morgan’s rejected parole leads to his own escape. It’s a slightly forced touch of melodrama that, on escape, he of course meets and falls in love with Kent’s sister Anne (Leila Hyams) who recognises him. It’s, of course, the silver bullet that sees Morgan vowing to go straight and allowing him to tick the film’s crucial moral boxes: he forswears crime (and willingly returns to prison when caught) but without sacrificing his loyalty to the prison code of no snitching. Once again, this is contrasted with the yellow Kent, who won’t admit his guilt and has no honour at all among the thieves.

The Big House culminates in Butch’s bungled escape attempt, made infinitely worse by Kent’s cowardly actions and Butch’s capacity for violence when crossed. You have to question the competence of the prison: crowded or not, Butch and his gang manage to smuggle in several guns, and the Warden’s refusal to even consider negotiating a release of captured guards Butch is hopefully not standard practice. This is probably the only prison film you’ll see where a tank rolls in to settle the matter (one possible cliché no one picked up), but the real heart of the clash is Morgan’s attempt to both stick to his new-found determination to do the right thing, without betraying his brotherly love for Butch.

It makes for a tense, high-octane, surprisingly ruthless final act in a prison film that sets out the rules but also tells a compelling, exciting and engaging story. With very good contrasting performances from Morris, Beery and Montgomery, it’s snappily directed with real verve by Hill, whose camera soaks up the impressively grand sets and then throws in to the midst of the violence. It’s interesting to see its moral judgements on its characters: loyalty prized above all other virtues – would that still be the case today?

No Other Choice (2025)

Jet black comedy, that makes strong, entertaining political points while testing our sympathies

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Lee Byung-hun (Yoo Man-su), Son Ye-jin (Lee Mi-ri), Park Hee-soon (Choi Seon-chul), Lee Sung-min (Goo Beom-mo), Yeom Hye-ran (Lee A-ra), Cha Seung-won (Ko Si-jo), Yoo Yeon-seok (Oh Jin-ho)

Technology changes the world, sometimes so much it leaves people behind. That’s the starting point of Park Chan-wook’s dark (very dark!) comic drama, No Other Choice, which looks at the surreally bleak ends sudden unemployment in a changing labour market has on a regular joe who prides himself on being his family’s provider. It takes Parasite and mixes it with Kind Hearts and Coronets, but with the mood dyed jet black and a complex anti-hero who becomes darker the more we learn about him.

That anti-hero is Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a hard-working paper industry supervisor, right up until his new employers follow-up a 25-year loyalty reward with a P45. Because who needs so humans when your factory can be run by a machine? Flash-forward a year later and Man-su is desperate: he can’t land a new job in the reduced paper industry and his wife Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) is suggesting it’s time to sell the home he spent a decade working to buy. Man-su decides on a desperate new plan: identify his more qualified rivals for a possible vacancy, murder them, then murder paper plant manager Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) and apply for his job. What could wrong?

This extreme response to feeling irrelevant in a changing world becomes the heart of Park Chan-wook’s black comedy, directed with his customary sharp-edged beauty with images and camera angles that make you want to swoon. It also walks a tight line between portraying Man-su as sympathetic, an (at first) laughably incompetent killer and, increasingly, a deeply flawed, bitterly resentful man, who resolutely refuses to adapt himself in any way to a changing world.

At first of course it’s hard not to feel sorry for Man-su, cast aside like a dirty off-cut from a company he has given his whole life too. No Other Choice takes its title from the cringe-worthy, rent-a-therapy mantra a jaw-droppingly shallow careers advisor pushes a roomful of redundant staff to repeat over and over again. It’s a mantra that stresses their lack of power and also bluntly sums up how they feel about their future: there are sod all real choices out there, only to adapt or die.

That’s certainly what Man-su, a hard-working supervisor respected by his staff, finds a year later. In a beautiful static shot of grinding irrelevance, a year flashes by of Man-su humiliatingly stacking shelves having failed time-and-time again at applications. A parade of humiliation follows: Man-su stripping out of his overalls in front of his unsympathetic (much younger) manager to attend an interview (shot in security camera distance long-shot); Man-su flunking an interview with clumsy answers to obvious questions, squinting at his interviewers sitting in front of a sun-bathed window; the smug father of his adopted son’s best friend offering to buy a house Man-su has poured his heart and soul into, while constantly disparaging it; literally begging outside a bathroom for Seon-chul to read his CV….

Is it any wonder he is overcome with something between resentment and despair? All that hard-earned respect, years of experience and mastery of the intricate details of paper production means nothing. All those promises of working hard and getting your due reward exposed as a puff of bullshit.

Maybe murder is a fair way to deal with this. After all, it’s not really his choice, right? Advertising a job vacancy at a fake company, he collects his rival’s CVs and carefully selects the better qualified to remove them from the jobs market. He then embarks on a life of crime which Park depicts with a haphazard chaos. Man-su is no expert: he needs multiple attempts to even take a pop at his first target, leaves key evidence behind at crime scenes (only chance saves from arrest) and makes a mess of hiding his tracks.

Lee Byung-hun has a gloriously disbelieving look to him, constantly unable to fully process what’s happening to him. Instead, he’s trying desperately to keep up a front that slowly collapses. It’s a brilliant performance, one that keeps us liking Man-su, even as his previously well-hidden dark side bubbles to the surface. Man-su prides himself as a careful, methodical gardener and he applies the same to his family, who he wants to protect and nurture. Each murder sees him crush more and more of this quality in himself: the man who tries to shelter his first victim from his wife’s infidelity, later finds himself comfortable dispatching others with cold-faced, determined ruthlessness.

It’s part of what makes No Other Choice such a genuinely surprising film. It would have been very easy for Park to embrace the dark comedy of Man-su’s Kind Hearts removal of obstacles. You could well imagine a Hitchcockian black comedy version. But what Park does is make us question our sympathies with Man-su. Pride is shown as his major flaw. Despite a multitude of transferable skills, he never considers new careers (something he even berates one of his targets for not doing, a rant clearly aimed as much at himself). He refuses free treatment for his tooth infection from Mi-ri’s charming dentist boss. He doesn’t attempt to change his lifestyle – or outgoings – during unemployment, burning through his redundancy package. He can’t imagine anything other than stepping back into an identical position to the one he has left.

On top of this, he’s an insecure, fragile man. A recovering alcoholic, Mi-ri makes clear when on the booze he was short-tempered, even striking their son. He becomes consumed with jealousy at her friendship with her boss (even, pathetically, asking to smell her underwear to check she has remained faithful). He’s very aware of his poor background and limited academic achievements. It becomes clear his job had grown to define him as a man of worth: without it he’s terrified that he is nothing, for all Mi-ri makes clear she doesn’t feel like this (much like the wife of his first victim makes clear its not her husband’s unemployment that’s the problem, more his drunken, self-destructive, self-pity).

Park doesn’t make it easy with Man-su’s victims. These aren’t comic portraits, but deeply human figures, both of whom are eerie self-reflections of Man-su. Goo Beuom is a tragically self-pitying alcoholic. Ko Si-jo is a devoted father of a young daughter, working over time to try and provide his family. These aren’t comic caricatures we can enjoy watching get bumped off (like multiple Alec Guinnesses) but living-breathing people, touched by tragedy. That’s why Man-su can barely bring himself to look at them when the moment comes.

It’s a darkness that starts running more and more through No Other Choice as Man-su’s determination to regain his status starts to destroy the very things he claims to value most: his family, principles and peace of mind. No Other Choice is fiercely critical of a world of AI-powered industrialisation where human workers are irrelevant: but Chan-wook refuses to romanticise the bitter realities of the people left enraged and resentful at the impact on their lives. It makes for an uncomfortable and challenging comedy, full of moral quandaries and sharp political statements.

Marty Supreme (2025)

Tension and anxiety overwhelm a dark caper film that’s easier to respect than enjoy

Director: Josh Safdie

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Marty Mauser), Gwyneth Paltrow (Kay Stone), Odessa A’zion (Rachel Mizler), Kevin O’Leary (Milton Rockwell), Tyler Okonma (Wally), Abel Ferrara (Ezra Mishkin), Fran Drescher (Rebecca Mauser), Luke Manley (Dion Galanis), John Catsimatidis (Christopher Galanis), Géza Röhrig (Bela Kletzki)

It’s 1952 and Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) is in the gutter aiming for the stars. A prodigiously talented table tennis player, he’s convinced it’s his destiny to become the world champion and face of the sport. To achieve this, he’ll go to any lengths lying, cheating and stealing. Marty relies on his relentless charisma to rope people in to support his increasingly risky scams and ploys. Among these are Rachel (Odessa A’zion), the married childhood friend he has got pregnant and Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) a retired Hollywood star, married to ruthless billionaire Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary).

Marty Supreme initially feels like it’s going to be a plucky underdog sports movie, with triumph due to defeat over adversity. What it actually turns out to be is something far closer to Safdie’s Uncut Gems, an immersive, sometimes hard to watch study in a man almost unaware of how frantically (and self-destructively) he is trying to keep lots of balls in the air. The bulk of the film focuses on Marty going to increasingly desperate lengths to secure the funding to get to the Tokyo World Championships. This picaresque journey sails into a swamp of stress and tension, involving gangsters with missing dogs, gun-toting New Jersey rednecks, sporting jocks furious at being hustled at table tennis, corrupt policemen in Central Park and constant parade of dangers, humiliations and threats with the odd spark of jet-black humour.

This is shot with a close-focused, shaky-cam series of close-ups, jerkily edited that practically spreads the stress of the on-screen desperation and disguised fear to the audience. The dialogue is frequently a parade of shouting, as the furiously deceived or exploited scream in between the never-ending stream of bare-faced, confidently delivered lies from Marty. And at its heart is charismatic dreamer Marty, who believes rules don’t apply to him and whose chaotic impulse control constantly pushes things further than can safely go, leading to him constantly seizing failure from success. Go into this expecting a lot of fun and laughs and you are probably in for a disappointment: go on expecting to be put through the wringer, and you will be better prepared!

Marty is a not a million miles from a Trump or Boris: a man of charisma and persuasion able to influence people to things, despite his shameless track record of instinctive lies and selfishness. Chalamet gives an extraordinary, screen-burningly vivid performance creating a man of total and complete certainty that he has a special destiny and therefore the normal rules of life do not apply to him, making him completely comfortable with routinely using and then abandoning the people around him. The fact he does this but still makes it constantly understandable why so many people keep coming back to Marty (despite being constantly stung) is a tribute to his soulfulness.

Beyond his in-the-moment confidence, Marty is a desperate, almost-principle-free force-of-nature, constantly re-spinning himself and his actions to new circumstances or audiences. Outrages become triumphs, lovers become sisters, compromises become commitments… Nothing is as it seems. His ego is also stunning: he demands tournament organisers put him up in the Ritz (where he eventually abuses the free bar), seduces Paltrow’s movie star largely it seems out of wanting to be seen as an equal and throws a colossal temper tantrum when outmatched at a tournament.

He’s constantly reinventing himself. Ideas he rejects as ridiculous or humiliating – a tour as half-time entertainment for the Harlem GlobeTrotters or an exhibition match with his Japanese rival – are later repackaged by him as his own flashes of inspiration when he eventually decides to do them. He genuinely can’t understand why others don’t see his greatness, or why the table tennis authorities can’t see his grandstanding and temper on court might be the best thing to grow the sport in the American market.

Marty believes he has all the tools for success, but his vaulting ambition and relentless energy is constantly undermined by his recklessness and tendency to act and, most especially, speak before he thinks constantly blows him up. He frequently turns on would-be supporters and friends with spontaneous abuse or smart-arse comments. He isn’t cruel (he says “I love you” persistently after various rude comments), but the damage is done. Over the course of film he’ll make a shockingly off-colour Holocaust joke (even he clocks the reaction, nervously saying it’s okay he’s Jewish), mocks Rockwell’s loss of his son fighting the same Japanese he’s now doing business with and bluntly tells Rachel she can’t understand him because she is not special (like he is).

Marty is, however, a phenomenally gifted table tennis player. Marty Supreme’s shooting of the sport is electrically fast (Chalamet trained for months to master the fast-pace, wildly aggressive style Marty plays with) and its staging of the matches is a surprisingly relaxing and entertaining. Especially when compared to the nerve-shredding anxiety-inducing terror of Marty’s less than successful hustling and scam career. Chalamet’s injects subtle panic and desperation under his relentless confidence.

Confidence is secretly what is lacking from retired Hollywood star Kay Stone, played with a wearily amused energy by Gwyneth Paltrow, both flattered and intrigued by the much younger Marty’s interest (you can see In Paltrow’s face the enjoyment behind her surface exasperation), This helps spark a desire to kickstart her career with a Broadway play – an awful looking Tennesse Wiliams pastiche, co-starring a self-important Brando-style method actor she despises (and Marty humiliates, to her delight). Her desire to be loved again is clear. There is a lovely shot where an entrance applause sees her turn away from the audience and her face to break into a radiant grin. It’s the same buzz of feeling desired and loved that keeps her connected to the disastrous Marty.

It’s also an escape from a life comes under the domineering control of her husband, pen-magnate Milton Rockwell (a reptilian and superbly vile Kevin O’Leary). Rockwell’s selfishness and manipulation of people is far more ruthless than Marty’s naïve, childish self-focus. It’s one of a host of great supporting turns. Odessa A’zion gives Rachel a scammers natural instinct (pregnancy and all) under her genuine devotion to Marty. A’zion is terrific, genuinely confused about her own feelings for Marty, anxious but determined and as prone to self-destructive gambits as he is. Tyler Okonma is similarly excellent as his best friend constantly dragged into Marty’s dangerous, half-baked crazy schemes at high risk to himself.

Marty Supreme throws all this towards with a relentless cavalcade of energy which is often easier to respect than to really enjoy. It’s such an anxiety inducing film, both in its plot and the shooting style, that it can leave you feeling genuinely uncomfortable in your chair. Does it offer any hope for Marty? It’s ending can suggest a level of personal growth: but seeing as we have witnessed throughout the film flashes of instinctive decency from Marty that have been cast aside for his own ambitions, I wouldn’t be confident. But that discomfort is probably right for a film that’s almost trying to make you feel sweaty and uncomfortable in your chair.

Boomerang! (1947)

Effective journalistic investigation into a murder case turns into engaging courtroom melodrama

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Dana Andrews (State’s Attorney Henry Harvey), Jane Wyatt (Madge Harvey), Lee J Cobb (Chief Harold Robinson), Cara Williams (Irene Nelson), Arthur Kennedy (John Waldron), Sam Levene (Dave Woods), Taylor Holmes (TM Wade), Robert Keith (‘Mac’ McCreery), Ed Begley (Paul Harris), Karl Malden (Lt White)

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a popular priest is gunned down in the street, the killer escaping into the night. The police are baffled. The city turns against the reformist mayor’s administration. Then, after several weeks, there is a lead as twitchy ex-soldier John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) is dragged in and, after hours-and-hours of interrogation without sleep, signs a confession. But who cares about small details like that, when everyone is sure the police has their man? But State’s Attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews) has doubts – and no pressure from the public or officials will make him build a case against an innocent man.

Based on an actual 1924 murder case, Boomerang! is told with journalistic sharpness by Elia Kazan that smoothly moves from investigative into courtroom drama. Boomerang! was cited by Kazan as when he started to find his voice, establishing a style that would carry him to Oscar-winning success in On the Waterfront and beyond. Shot largely in location (though admittedly in a different Connecticut town than Bridgeport), it’s full of the immediacy of the streets, avoiding sets and forced studio locations. Kazan leans into the journalistic feel, with a voiceover explaining events and an earnest attempt throughout to make it feel like we are watching real events unfold.

It captures people going about their everyday lives: gossiping over laundry, strolling down streets, pounding typewriters in press rooms, gathering in church and shops. This is a film designed to convey a full sense of a real world. That goes as well for reflecting the investigation, which is full of the visceral pounding of pavements and hustling of suspects into police cars as well as the interrogations of the worn-down Waldron, taking place in an inhospitable room where never-ending questions means Waldron’s head has to be literally picked up to continue answering the questions.

The observational strengths of the film’s opening eventually moves into something more straight-forwardly melodramatic, but Kazan’s documentary restraint tries it best to not make this shift too jarring. As Harvey’s doubts grow, he becomes under increasing pressure from officialdom, principally from Ed Begley’s sweaty Paul Harris (who is too noticeably dodgy from the start for his villainy to be anything like a surprise). This is before a series of courtroom dynamics that hue towards the sort of fireworks you find in larger-than-life films than the journalistic reserve Boomerang! starts with.

Which isn’t to say that these courtroom dynamics are not very well-handled, especially by the under-rated Dana Andrews, who brings just the right amount of humanity and dignity to an otherwise stiff-on-paper character of a crusading, too-good-to-be-true attorney. Andrews delivers the courtroom speeches, and the detailed breakdown of the flaws in the police case, with a real quiet passion – just as he brings a nice degree of moral outrage to the bullying attempts to silence him.

Boomerang! provides several opportunities for compelling character actors, many of whom went on to work again for Kazan to great success. Lee J Cobb’s bulldog fierceness is perfect for put-upon police Captain Robinson who lets his determination to prove he can crack the case compromise his judgement. Cobb gives Robinson a powerful sense of authority – there is a wonderful scene where he faces down a would-be lynch mob with little more than growling disapproval. There is also a lovely moment, where he lifts the sleeping Waldron and carries him into his bed with all the care of a loving father. He’s well backed by Karl Malden as an eager-to-please inexperienced cop.

Arthur Kennedy produces one of his expert portraits in weakness as Waldron, an embittered veteran who has found peace offers little more than failure. While never losing track of what makes Waldron suspicious, Kennedy finds a neat line in vulnerability and fear keeps him sympathetic. Opposite him, Cara Williams explodes with righteous fury as a former girlfriend who believes herself wronged, eager to see Waldron condemned. It’s a more interesting role than any other female role in the film, although Jane Wyatt finds some engaging warmth in the dull role of Andrews’ loyal wife.

Boomerang! at heart is a film about the barrel being fine, aside from a few rotten apples. The crime takes place after the old machine politics system has been cast aside by new politicians, not beholden to the system, willing to introduce reforms. And, by and large, they are shown to really mean it – even if, at one point, some express the view that it doesn’t matter if Waldron is guilty or innocent, since winning means the reformists can remain in power. But all the real sins are collected in the hands of Begley’s character: even the police are absolved, despite the fact we watch them essentially brow-beat a man into confessing (a sergeant even suggesting they rough him up a bit to speed things along, which makes you wonder what the system was like for people are not veterans the police captain feels sorry for).

Boomerang! pulls any punches of really exploring systemic flaws, even while it covers an innocent man being bum-rushed into a trial. But then it puts complete faith in the idea that the same system will turn around and do its job by ensuring he is completely absolved – with the only danger from corrupt elected officials, not the blindness of a potential system. It’s a factor Kazan (to be fair) felt the film made too many compromises on – and he’s right. It might tell a scare story, but Boomerang! is fundamentally a reassuring film that is sure everything will turn out right in the end.

The Thin Man (1934)

Complex mysteries take a backseat to witty wordplay in this charming, funny comedy

Director: W.S. Van Dyke

Cast: William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O’Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant), Nat Pendleton (Lt John Guild), Minna Gombell (Mimi Wynant Jorgenson), Porter Hall (Herbert MacCauley), Henry Wadsworth (Tommy), William Henry (Gilbert Wynant), Harold Huber (Arthur Nunheim), Cesar Romero (Chris Jorgensen), Natalie Moorhead (Julia Woolf), Edward Ellis (Clyde Wynant)

Wealthy businessmen Wynant (Edward Ellis) is missing and his daughter Dorothy (Maureen O’Sullivan) needs someone to find him: particularly as the police suspect Wynant is a killer after his mistress Julia (Natalie Moorhead) is found dead, under suspicion of stealing $25k from him. Can she persuade debonair, playboy detective Nick Charles (William Powell) to put the martinis aside and take a break from his never-ending banter with wife Nora (Myrna Loy) to help unpick this mystery?

But of course she can, in this hugely enjoyable murder mystery. Inspired by a Dashiell Hammett novel (but you feel only loosely). In fact, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s script (with the encouragement of WS Van Dyke) focused a lot less on the mystery and a lot more on the sparky interplay between Nick and Nora. The Thin Man is really a crackerjack, joke-a-minute screwball comedy with a murder loosely attached. If anything, it feels more like a comedic Agatha Christie Tommy-and-Tuppence yarn – it even has a final scene where Nick gathers the suspects together over dinner to explain exactly what happened.

Not that Nicks’ actor, William Powell, particularly followed the complex plot details. But then I’m not sure anyone making The Thin Man expected anyone else to either. For starters, most viewers came away with the impression that the debonair Powell was the title’s thin man, rather than Wynant (the original crime relied on the victim being thin) – and the producers eagerly embraced that misconception, with a host of sequels following, each titled with a twist on the thin man.

Besides, the viewers were here for the banter not the crime drama. The Thin Man was shot at a lightening pace by Van Dyke (earning his nickname “one-take Woody”) over no more than twelve days. The reason being that was the length of time Myrna Loy was available for, and her chemistry with Powell was second-to-none. And you can tell it in the film, which has a loose, improvisational quality between the two leads who are often essentially fooling around on camera with each other, pulling faces and telling off-the-cuff jokes far more than spending time actually cracking the case.

And that’s where the joy of the picture really is. It’s huge fun to see the two of them playfully mock hit each other before reverting to affectionate hugs when Lt Guild turns to look at them. Or slapstick business around an icebag to the head for a hung-over Nora. The sort of film where we spent several minutes watching Nick playfully shoot balloons off a Christmas tree with an air rifle from ridiculous positions (until he finally hits a window). Both actors capture perfectly the mood of jaunty, cocktail fuelled, archly witty fun that really powers the film, like Noel Coward goes investigating.

Both actors are at the top of their game. Powell’s casual air of permanent intoxication doesn’t dim his razor-sharp cleverness. Somehow, he manages to remain smooth and stylish, even as he pulls a parade of silly faces. It’s a hugely entertaining, charismatic performance that bounces brilliantly off Myrna Loy’s equally fine performance of arch comic skill. Like Powell, Loy matches playful silliness with sexy sensuality and a winning way with a comic line. Van Dyke encourages both of them to carry out as much natural kidding around as possible (there’s even a moment when Powell drops slightly out of frame, the camera not keeping up with his off-the-cuff japery).

The two of them are a perfect fit for a pair constantly in a state of inebriation. Nora even orders six martinis (all to be lined up) alongside Nick’s one when she finds out he’s that many drinks ahead of her. Nick’s first reaction to be woken up in the middle of the night is reaching for a drink. Despite this, the two of them are sublimely cool under fire (literally) as only Golden-era Hollywood types can be. In fact, being held at gun point in the middle of the night feels like only an inconvenience in the way of a nightcap.

In fact, what’s really striking about The Thin Man is how it shows a real marriage of equals. They may bicker at points – and Nick may joke he married Nora for her money – but they work as a fully unified team. If one has a sharp line, the other an equally sharper comeback and if they make decisions they make it as a team. And, of course, they still have the hots for each other (the film ends with a classic cutaway to them climbing into the same bunk, hammering it home with their dog Asta covering her eyes and a cut to a train steaming away on the track). No wonder audiences absolutely soaked up the energy: just years after the end of prohibition, here was a fun-loving couple all about enjoying every inch of the pleasure’s life had to offer.

The whole tone of The Thin Man is about coating murder mystery in fun. From party guests who tip into the comically ridiculous (my favourite being a melancholic businessman who keeps weeping at the Charles’ Christmas Bash because he feels he needs to call his Momma) to an over-enthusiastic dog (Asta, played by celebrity mutt Skippy) whose whims constantly butt into the Charles’ never-ending drinking, flirting and banter. I love William Henry’s Gilbert, who never moves without a large reference book and uses a parade of out-of-context terms he clearly doesn’t understand such as Oedipal or thinking sexagenarian is a sex addict or mispronouncing sadist as sad-est.

With all this background colour, no wonder most people didn’t really give a damn who did the thin man in (or even who the hell the thin man was). We were here for the fun, for Powell and Loy and for the jokes and banter. With Van Dyke encouraging a freeform style from start to finish (Powell’s first scene was his first practice, unknowingly filmed, his relaxed comedy so perfect Van Dyke printed it straight away), The Thin Man is wild, entertaining and funny ride which continues to entertain as viewers try to stop giggling to work out its elaborately obscure mystery.

Z (1969)

Costa-Gravas thrilling conspiracy thriller is possibly one of the finest political films ever made

Director: Costa-Gravas

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Examining Magistrate), Yves Montand (Deputy), Irene Papas (Helene, the Deputy’s wife), Pierre Dux (General), Jacques Perrin (Photojournalist), Charles Denner (Manuel), François Périer (Public Prosecutor), Georges Géret (Nick), Bernard Fresson (Matt), Marcel Bozzuffi (Vago), Julian Guiomar (The Colonel), Gérard Darrieu (Barone), Jean Bouise (Georges Pirou), Jean-Pierre Miquel (Pierre)

Costa-Gravas Z is an explosive political thriller, ripping a lightly fictionalised story from the Greek headlines (the opening credits playfully state ‘any resemblance to real people is ‘purely intentional!’) and turning it into a compellingly angry, cold-eyed look at political repression. It was based on the state-backed murder of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 and the investigation by magistrate Christos Sartzetakis which briefly looked like it might expose repressive military forces but actually kick-started a 1967 military junta counter coup in Greece. Z takes this as inspiration for a truly universal story that continues to feel like ‘it could happen here’.

Lambrakis becomes The Deputy, played with great charm and determined charisma by Yves Montand. After death threats, he is murdered after a political rally by two thugs in a hit-and-run, in a public square, surrounded by police officers and a legion of witnesses. The police, represented by the virulent anti-communist General (Pierre Dux) declare it a tragic accident. They firmly expect our Sartzetakis-figure (Jean-Louis Trintignant, putting his enigmatic unreadability to extraordinarily good-use), son of a war hero, to back-up their bullshit. But he didn’t get the memo, conducting a genuine investigation which reveals the extensive links between the military and police and far-right organisations, how they planned the hit and did everything to ensure its success. But will this investigation lead to real change?

Costa-Gravas’ film is a hard-boiled conspiracy thriller with echoes of The Battle of Algiers’ primal urgency and immediacy. It’s committed to throwing you into the middle of the turmoil, with fast-cutting, hand-held camerawork, tracking shots through crowds and shots which zero in on the faces of victims and perpetrators alike. The film’s influence on directors like Oliver Stone is palpable. But, unlike Stone’s work, Z wears its moral outrage carefully: it presents events with a journalistic matter-of-factness, trusting us to recognise the corrupt horror of over-mighty governments. The resolute professionalism of Trintignant’s magistrate helps enormously here – heroism in this world is being honest and doing your job.

What Costa-Gravas film reveals is that these authorities believe they can act with utter impunity, convinced they will never be questioned by anyone, other than their liberal targets. Z opens with a darkly comic scene that outlines this thinking: during a lecture, the pompous General outlines (to a military audience shown impassively watching in a series of quick reaction cuts) his theory of ‘ideological mildew’ attacking the ‘tree of liberty’, using a tortured pesticide metaphor to suggest it is their duty to kill the mildew (liberals and socialists). This tyrannical view is parroted by people who are neither lip-smacking villains or fiendishly clever – they just have absolute, fixed certainty.

Z makes clear that such men, placed in position of authority, will attempt to shape events with a breath-taking arrogance. The assassination plot is shockingly clumsy and obvious and cover-up so full of transparent bare-faced lies, you’d need to be impossibly arrogant to even consider you could get away with it. Copious evidence shows meetings between senior officers and members of the right-wing CROC group. It’s claimed the Deputy’s fatal head-wound came from hitting the pavement, even though this is ruled impossible by both an autopsy and hundreds of witnesses. The General claims not to know the driver who ‘rushed’ the wounded Deputy to hospital (stopping at every opportunity), even though the man is his personal chauffeur. Everyone repeats the same tortured, unusual phrases – from the head of police to the thugs themselves.

It doesn’t stop there. Once it becomes clear Trintignant’s magistrate is genuinely investigating – that he has his own mind and opinions – the clumsy cover up turns aggressive. Blame is put on the Deputies own supporters (the word ‘false-flag operation’ didn’t exist then, but the idea is seized on); his lawyer is almost killed in a park hit-and-run in front of dozens of witnesses; a witness who can testify to the plans of the hitmen is pressured, told he has epilepsy, framed as a radical (he’s clearly not) and then nearly assassinated by one of the hit-men (put up in the same military hospital with a pretend broken leg), who flees the scene and in front of his doctors, while giggling at his cheek.

Some of this is in fact blackly funny. It perhaps almost would be, if it wasn’t for Z’s moral indignation. Even without murder, this is a repressive, corrupt regime: the Deputy’s team have innumerable petty obstacles placed in their way for their rally, their supporters are openly attacked by bused in protestors mixed with baton-wielding under-cover officers. Costa-Gravas doesn’t show the Deputy as a saint – flashbacks reveal he is an adulterer – but it does make clear his bravery (confronting and cowing crowds of anti-liberal rioters, utterly unrestrained by the police), leadership and the fear he overcomes. It also shows, especially in Irene Papas’ emotionally underplayed but quietly devastating performance, the raw grief of those who love him. His closest colleagues weep at news of his death, the post-death slandering of him all-the-more disgusting.

Z presents its evidence with an increasingly overwhelming force. The magistrate corrects (for a long time) any use of the word murder for ‘accident’ – by the time he himself says ‘murder’ it’s almost easy for us to miss it, so natural has the conclusion become. Pressure is, of course, applied to him: senior officers bluster about metaphorical eggs and omelettes; his bosses suggest he charge only the hit-men and (for good measure) charge the Deputy’s people for disrupting the peace by holding the rally in the first place. Plenty of ordinary people know exactly what’s going on, but don’t want to take risks: a newspaper editor reports what he’s told to, the Deputy’s doctor regrets not joining his lonely ‘march for peace’ but, well, you know how it is…

Given the blatant criminality of the police and the army – and the sadistic arrogance of hit-man Vago (an uncomfortable beat in Z is the whiff of homophobia in the depiction of Vago as a predatory homosexual and pederast) – it’s truly triumphant to see them bought to book. Despite their bombast (each officer states he will have no choice but to take his life to avoid the shame, something of course none of them do), each flees the building railing at the press. (The General, an antisemite among everything else, even roars ‘Dreyfus was guilty!’ when a journalist compares the affair to that).

But it’s short-lived. Perhaps Irene Papas’ Helene knows it will be when she responds to news of the arrest with a quiet middle-distance stare. Z closes with a dark coda that could almost be funny if it wasn’t horrifying. A photojournalist (played by producer Jacques Perrin) who we have followed uncovering the plot, reports the aftermath: initial resignations followed by slap-on-the-wrist sentences for the hit-men, charges dropped for the officers and a coup d’etat (at this point a cut removes Perrin) which sees the arrest or ‘accidental’ death of all the Deputy’s supporters, a junta government and bans of everything from authors, mini-skirts, modern mathematics and, above all, the letter Z, as zi has been taken by protestors as the badge ‘He Lives’.

It would be funny. It almost is funny. If it wasn’t part of a system that crushes freedom with violence and murder. Costa-Gravas’ brilliant, engrossing and perfectly judged film shows how terrifyingly swiftly it can happen, how freedoms and justice can be strangled before our very eyes. Watching it today, you can’t imagine a time when it won’t be coldly, chillingly, terrifyingly relevant.

Prizzi’s Honor (1985)

Would-be satirical mafia farce, that is slow, dense and insufficiently funny to hit its target

Director: John Huston

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Charley Partanna), Kathleen Turner (Irene Walkervisks/Irene Walker/Mrs Heller), Anjelica Huston (Maerose Prizzi), Robert Loggia (Eduardo Prizzi), John Randolph (Angelo Partanna), Lee Richardson (Dominic Prizzi), Michael Lombard (Rosario Filangi), Lawrence Tierney (Lt Davey Hanley)

Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) is a good-natured guy, loyal to his job – which just happens to be rubbing people out for the Prizzi crime family in New York. His gentle amble through Mafia life is thrown out of whack after a parade of unlucky events, silly mistakes and random occurrences. All of these can be linked back to his falling in love with Irene Walkervisks (Kathleen Turner), a con-woman, assassin and practised liar who may-or-may-not be in love with the besotted Charley. These two find themselves in the middle of a complex Prizzi family feud, much of it built up by Charley’s former girlfriend Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston). What sides will everyone pick?

John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor was one of the first films to take Mafia tropes, all that iconography The Godfather had made so ubiquitous and try and satirise it. Adapted from Richard Condon’s novel (by Condon), it carefully recreates the style and features of Mafia films, replaying the conventions – feuds, hits, femme fatales, pay-offs – with a streak of comedy. But what it lacks is the zip and energy this sort of dark satire really needs. It’s far too stately and never quite funny enough. Instead, it’s often slow and difficult to follow – and, damningly, is most engaging when it’s most like a regular gangster film.

It feels like an old man’s film. I’d defy you to look at this and then The Asphalt Jungle and not feel Huston was lacking fire here with this frequently untense, and slow film. It opens with a hugely over-extended wedding sequence, almost twenty minutes long, which laboriously introduces the characters. It frequently fails to pick to the pace from there: too many scenes lack thrust and drive, working their way slowly towards narratively unclear purposes. Now sometimes that is because so many of the characters are lying to each other – but Prizzi’s Honor does a consistently poor job of making sure we are either aware of the real truth or that we are in full understanding of the stakes at play.

A large part of the fault is the wordy, dense screenplay from Richard Condon (how did a sharp adapter of books like Huston allow this?). It takes nearly an hour for the film to really get going with a proto gang-war initiated by Irene impulsively shooting a police captain’s wife during a botched hit. Along the way, it creates too many long conversation scenes that lack spark or wit. It’s a far too faithful an adaptation, relying far too much on telling not showing. Multiple off-screen plot developments (involving complex double cross schemes) are related to us through conversations that are (honestly) hard to follow, boring to watch and delivered and shot with a flat, functional lack of interest. All of these would have worked better with a mixture of words and visuals – seeing some of these complex events playout, with an accompanying voiceover (the sort of thing Scorsese would have done brilliantly – see Casino).

Neither script nor direction is sprightly or engaging enough. It’s languid musical score and the ambling camerawork and editing also doesn’t help. It consistently feels slow, it’s meaning fuzzy, it’s action not gripping enough, it’s jokes not funny enough. Each scene is either too over-stuffed with plot-heavy information or too light on emotional connection or purpose. I’d be surprised if many people could explain exactly how the plot mechanics worked when the credits roll which, for a film that gives over a lot of time to slowly explaining things in dense dialogue is not a good sign.

The film depends on its performers to spring into life. Best of all is Anjelica Huston’s Oscar-winning turn as Maerose, disgraced black sheep of the Prizzi family. She rips into this vampish manipulator, running rings around the other characters with her sexual power or superb play-acting (there is a great scene when she makes herself up to look depressed and miserable to win the sympathy of her dim kingpin father played by Lee Richardson). It’s a funny, engaging and dangerous performance that you wish was in the film a hell of a lot more than it is. Close behind is William Hickey, rasping with malice, as a lizardry Godfather full of greed, ambition and utterly lacking in morals, presenting a neat sideways parody of Brando-style figures.

The two leads have their moments. Jack Nicholson is surprisingly restrained as Charley, surely one of the most gentle and dim characters he’s ever played (probably the film’s best joke, since it’s JACK). Nicholson gives him a childish naivety, easy to manipulate, whether that’s Irene saying she definitely didn’t know about the Prizzi-robbing scam her late husband pulled alongside her or the rings the smarter Prizzi’s and his consiglieri father (a coldly jovial John Randolph) run round him. He’s sexually naïve – putty in the hands of Maerose (‘With the lights on?’ he asks with meek bewilderment when she invites him to a clinch in her apartment) and Irene (‘On the phone? Now?’ he asks when she suggests some sexy banter) – and, with his New Yoick accent and prominent upper lip feels like a dutiful child trusted to run errands by his parents.

Opposite him Kathleen Turner embraces the lusty femme fatale qualities that made her a star, playing a husky voiced practised liar with a ruthless heart. Prizzi’s Honor though deals Turner a tough-hand: she’s the most enigmatic character and possibly its most poorly developed, the film giving so little clarity to her inner life that part of me wonders if Turner herself was slightly confused as to her character. Even in a film where the female lead is a ruthless, murdering grifter, she’s still largely only seen in relation to the men in the film – a potentially satirical point the film doesn’t really develop at all.

Both actors give sterling performances, but so slow and artificial is the film, so laboured its pacing that I found it extremely hard to care about what was truth what was a lie. Prizzi’s Honor has small moments but it’s devoid of the energy and pace that could have made it a dark comic delight. With the lack of investment it creates in an audience, it’s frequently hard-to-follow plot developments and clumsy, unengaging exposition, even the dark ending is unlikely to make much an impact. Hugely praised at the time – partly, you feel, due to affection for its director – it’s a slow, unengaging film that only briefly sparks to life.