Word: noir
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...BOTTOM LINE: A remake of a 1950 film noir provides Robert De Niro with a star turn around a muddy track...
...flung out as Harry scuttles frantically through his meaningless rounds, are a kind of screen, preventing us from making any real connection with Harry. In part it's because Harry's context is neither a realistic portrait of modern New York nor a persuasive movie metaphor -- as classic film noir often was -- for urban scuzziness...
...album with his Quartet West, shows Haden, now 55, at his lyrical peak. It is a kind of musical-dream autobiography, part funky and part rhapsodic, that evokes the style of his early Los Angeles days as well as the mythic mood of vintage L.A., the film- noir city. Chinatown. Chandlertown...
...only for its accomplishment but also for what it represents. Before X, the number of great authentic African-American operas stood at precisely one: Scott Joplin's underrated Treemonisha, which foreshadowed X's themes of black self-reliance and self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once...
Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy. Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are appealingly strange -- different from the American...