Based on a True Story: Hitchcock Between Reality and Subjectivity

|Malcolm Cooke| At the start of The Wrong Man, a darkly silhouetted Alfred Hitchcock declares this film is different from all the ones he has made before: this story is true, and he intends to tell it with clinical accuracy. Hitchcock takes this task seriously, so seriously in fact that critic… Continue reading

Smooth Vanilla Twist with Crunchy Lead Filling: The Brutal Stakes of Assault on Precinct 13

Three people -- a man with a rifle, a woman with a pistol, and a man wearing a prisoner's uniform -- stand in a smoky room, staring at a uniformed police officer.

|Lucas Hardwick| If you were to drive by L.A.’s Anderson Police Precinct 13 in a modern day alternate reality, you’d find a district simply known as The Precinct, vibrating with hipsters in an entirely gentrified neighborhood surrounded by condos housing Instagram influencers and artsy… Continue reading

Some disorganized thoughts about poliziotteschi films from the Trylon programmer

Original promotional illustration for "Confessions of a Police Captain" featuring three duplicated images of a man shooting a machine gun next to a larger image of a mustached man.

|John Moret| Generally speaking, I love crime cinema in nearly all its forms. The French Connection (1971), Massacre Gun (1967), The Glass Key (1942), Le Cercle Rouge (1970), Columbo (1971-2003)—pretty much any decade, from any country, you can find genuinely great films… Continue reading

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: An Allegory of Decadence

A black-and-white photo of a man in a suit, arms crossed, standing in a room in which large handprints can be seen on sheets hanging from the ceiling.

|Yuval Klein| The Italian neorealism era of 1940s cinema conveyed social frustration and stories of the working class through realism and minimal-ism. In the decades after, the face of Italian cinema  would gain many dimensions and features that grew upon yet deviated from the standard. Continue reading