Running Out Of Time (1999) / Running Out Of Time 2 (2001) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 158 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column It does not take long to find out why Johnnie To’s feature is called Running Out Of Time. For it begins with a man, Cheung Wah (Andy Lau), walking…
Le Cercle Rouge first published by Movie Gazette The French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) specialised in ‘policiers’, or crime films, tapping into a dark vein of pessimism which has always lain buried deep within classic American film noir, and refining it into an existentialist vision of the world and man’s place in it. Perhaps best…
Le Doulos first published by Movie Gazette ‘Doulos’ is French slang for a hat, and also for a police informer – and accordingly both hats and duplicity feature large in Jean-Paul Melville’s film Le Doulos, in a combination and quantity not seen again until the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990). Maurice (Serge Reggiani), fresh out of prison,…
Veteran review for the ‘0th’ Edition of the London East Asian Film Festival (LEAFF 2015) “No police has ever touched one of the superrich,” team chief Oh (Oh Dal-su) tells his detective Seo Do-cheol (Hwang Jung-min) in Veteran. Still, Ryoo Seung-wan‘s eleventh feature carefully teases out the points of contact between these two otherwise disparate…