MALLORCA
Years ago, I went on a cheap package tour to Spain with a gang of working-class Brits who complained mightily about the food — chiefly the lack of hamburgers and pork ‘n’ beans. Their ignorance, their loss: To this day, I remain awed by what I saw in a supermarket there — an entire aisle…
THE GOOD THIEF
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur opens with a glistening panorama of Paris at night photographed from Montmartre, the alabaster 19th-century church on a hilltop that overlooks the Pigalle, Paris’ red-light district, where one of the red lights these days is the neon burst of the Moulin Rouge. From there, we come down to street level…
X2
In X2, the first superpowered “mutant” we see is trying to kill the President. He’s an agile humanoid who leaps around like a monkey on speed and avoids bullets by disappearing in a puff of smoke, only to reappear a few feet away an instant later. It’s a Secret Service nightmare — an assassin from…
POOLHALL JUNKIES
Back when Johnny Doyle was living on the streets and still having wet dreams, he also had a daydream: to make a respectable living as a professional pool player. But suddenly it’s 15 years later and Johnny (Mars Callahan) is 30, working dreary jobs and hustling pool-hall pigeons thanks to his evil former childhood mentor…
RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL
Consider it further proof of the equal-and-opposite-reaction phenomenon: Just as American filmmakers spent decades vilifying Reds in such films as I Was a Communist for the FBI, so did their Soviet counterparts continually craft cinematic jabs at the red, white and blue. The very first example, product of a still-fledgling Soviet film industry, was the…
